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The 3Com Saga
prostoalex writes "A flashback to 5 years ago reveals 3Com as a global multi-billion dollar company, respected and revered around the world. Today Bob Metcalfe's creation is a money-losing $2 billion dollar operation trying to find its niche. The 3Com Saga from Network World magazine takes a look at the history of 3Com Corp."
Why would you buy a network card when nearly every mainboard has one built-in? And even the chipsets are losing to Intel...
If you outsource critical functions like R&D and to a lesser extent manufacturing innovation, you will lose your business edge. All your good engineers end up at the parts companies you contract to, and their precious IP will not be yours.
The home network was really made practical by the invention of the home router. It used to be that I wouldn't buy anything but a 3COM NIC. They were simply the best. They just worked, every time. You'd buy 3com switches whenever Cisco was too much. Then came DSL and cable, and with it, the Linksys Cable/DSL router. People could share their internet connections very, very easily, and now there was a market for home users to have some pretty serious network equipment. I trust that little Linksys box now, and will buy their NICs, and their switches, and whatever else they make, because that little box does the same thing as an expensive 3com router and switch, just on a smaller scale.
If 3com made something easier and cheaper than Linksys's device, they'd still be in the game. However, Linksys and others have proven themselves worthy in the home, and this causes network administrators to buy their equipment for work.
-twb
3Com has always been a highly-regarded company in my opinion, because they provided quality network/communication solutions.
However, across the years, network integration got tighter, standardized, and quite honestly, 3com's purpose is loosing against companies such as Linksys, D-Link, and other names that just sound "tacky". Think about it, you've got network cards made by a company that used to make cables. Motherboard makers are embedding their network functionnality. 3Com's telephone systems weren't that great. Their switches are over-priced for what they can do.
On the other hand, the 3c5xx ethernet chipsets are still the most reliable nic's that I've even seen... But I don't think they can just survive on nic's
3Com's biggest problem is that they stayed focused to the corporate world, while the corporate world (SME's) started cutting corners and started buying SOHO stuff instead, because the product was much more adapted to their needs than an enterprise-grade device.
Try buying a phone for their NBX series.
$500 for a phone. Oh, actually, the phone is only $299. But you have to buy a license for the phone, which costs $200.
Have one of their old phones die (out of warranty) and need to replace it? $500. "But it should only be $299, because they must already have a license for the old one, right?" Nope, sorry. New phone requires a new 'license'.
3Com can rot in hell for all I care.
Simple. People stopped using dialup and 3Com couldn't keep up in the NIC card market
Are you kidding? People have not stopped using dialup at all. Yes, broadband is accesible to more people today, but there are *lots* of people still accessing the internet via plain old telephone system.
The problem is, many of today's mainboards come with integrated modem, usually by the same manufacturer of the sound card and probably the network card.
US Robotics used to make damn fine sturdy modems (I had one that could withstand the most horrid lines at a reasonable speed. You could accidentally lift an extension and the modem would carry on).
The Total Control line of NAS was also fine (even if their Total Switches were lock prone), then they suddenly waned out of the market for some reason.
The spin-off mania didn't help them, IMHO.
No sig
Dell's critical functions are marketing and logistics. Their marketing gurus and logistics engineers are very much their own. Dell is not a "technology" company per se.
3Com was a true technology company because they designed and fabbed their own chips off the sweat of their 300 engineers. Now they have 900 mercinaries who are not loyal to them in any way, and the patents on their work are no longer assets that they can use to protect their bottm line with.
Accounting conservatism at the expense of innovation is hurting 3Com. Let's hope that they find their courage soon. The are not a financial company or a holding group. 3Com was born in tech, and will die if it strays too far away.
US Robotics actually developed the first palms. But 3com was never interested in Palms, they bought US Robotics because they were the gold standard in modems and when you're a network company, modems are a goood business to be in.
I think that was lack of foresight on 3coms part. When I got my palm 1000 I knew I was gonna be using one for the rest of my life, why didn't 3com know? :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
That said, we have been buying 3Com almost exclusively for the last 9 years but now I'm ticked off. I won't pay for basic tech support that they're now charging for because I don't feel that I should have to given the prices they charge for hardware *and* the fact that I won't call unless there's really a problem. If I worked for a for-profit business there'd be no problem but I don't and I have to watch what I spend even more closely.
Even firmware updates for the 4400 are no longer free (there were three released this year alone) and it's really getting irritating so we finally decided to switch to HP for all of our network switches for now and see how that goes. I have had good luck with HP in the past and I know lots of people who use it and love it.
Sorry 3Com, I just can't afford you anymore...
Have you hugged your penguin today?
They lost in the enterprise. 3Com networking gear (switches and routers) was too unreliable to run even a small enterprise. Cisco, Bay, Cabletron and the likes (many also now dead) beat them there, and even Intel switches were much better. 3Com now has decent switches, but they don't offer big, bad core gear a large business needs.
Way Back When, I had a boatload of 3Com gear, including enough of their ethernet hubs to fill a room, another room full of their diskless workstations, and so on.
Strike #1 was pissing off the enterprise customer. After a very ungraceful exit from the server/NOS marketplace, they concentrated on their infrastructure business. Unfortunately, both their hubs and workstations suffered from design defects which made them into a huge liability.
Strike #2 was pissing off the VAR/Integrator market. While their network bridges and routers actually had better features and a lower entry point than Cisco's gear, they did nothing with it, and totally ignored the requirement to have a full line of products, from low-end to almost-carrier-grade. Combine that with several abortive attempts to bypass your channel "partners", and...
Strike #3: Take the only thing you have, which is brand recognition, and instead of using the high-end name that everyone associates with "hey, that's good enough that I'm willing to pay a premium", and instead use the low-end name which competes with the lowest price around.
Sometime in the mid-to-late 90's, I listened to Eric Benhamou give his vision for the future of 3Com. I went back to my hotel, plugged in my laptop, and sold my 3Com stock.
Have you considered that the high price wasn't due to the brand or model of NIC the tech was installing, but instead it was overpriced because you were buying it from him?
To my knowledge(I may be wrong), most techs who go to homes to install/setup broadband are contract labor, i.e. not company employees, so they can pretty much screw you on a whim. Even if he was a company employee, it may have been company policy to over-price the NICs.
My point is that he might have over-charged you even if he installed a no-name piece of shit.
Just a thought.
I've worked at my job for 5 years now and have gone through over 2000 workstations with 3Com cards 3C509 Etherlink III/3c905/b/c. Failure of these cards is extrememly rare in my experience, and overall they have been great cards. I've never never had a single problem using Ghost with them (as someone here posted), and just recently I bought a 3c905c ($40.00) so I could turn my old gateway box into a BSD router/firewall. I could have bought a cheapy Linksys, which I use in my workstations, but since it was for my router, I wanted a card that handled part of the load itself. For this task, 3Com was a no-brainer to me.
As for 3Com making a comeback: aside from high end cards, the NIC market seems like a commodity market now. Perhaps they can make headway in the switch/router market?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I find it amazing that a company of MBNA's stature did not have dual-redundant facilities. I work for a large player in the insurance industry, and we spend more $$ to dual-redundantly (dual carriers, dual divergent paths) connect our buildings and satellite offices than these guys apparantly did to secure their operations. The next person that should have been fired in that meeting was the CIO.