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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.
Simple. People stopped using dialup and 3Com couldn't keep up in the NIC card market. But seriously, 3Com used to make some very high quality modems when I first started getting into the internet.
It is a great shame that Metcalfe has resorted to trolling in order to get people to take notice of him these days:
/ 06 /21/990621opmetcalfe.xml
http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/99
Sez Bob: "The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology."
Just like ethernet...
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.
Never shoulda given up Palm...remember when Palm's were all subranded US Robotics, and then 3Com?
Actually, I'm kinda talkin' outta my a$$ here...I have no idea if selling Palm was a good business decision or not. I just know I've always like PalmOS, and 3Com used to get some advertising every time I put my PDA on its cradle...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I also remember a time when Telus was in the process of dumping 3Com ADSL modems for DLink of all companies, because DLink made a better business case (read better price) for a product that was 99.9% as reliable as the 3Com product.
So to sum it all up I think that 3Com sort of let things get away by simply not keeping up with the economy of computing, not the raw technology. They still have all kinds of respect in the industry, they just have to re-learn how to sell themselves.
That really is my homepage, no kidding.
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.
IMO would have to be Intel. I find Intel's NICs to be pretty rock solid, and pretty resonable in terms of their prices.
Not to mention that lots of mobos ship with Intel's NICs built right in.
Anyone with me on this?
Sunny Dubey
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Almost anyone that is still using dialup is either
1) lacking any other options
2) doesn't give a flying monkey about the performance of their modem
Group 2 will be entirely happy with their motherboards soft-modem which negates a lot of the demand for real ones.
We all know that inabiliity to run your own business is always IBM's fault.
Help fight continental drift.
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?
That's a very damning look at 3com... customers are supposed to be one of the most important things to a company (because if they're not happy, what're they going to do? Not come back, that's what) but the article insinuates that they dumped them like a cart full of wrinkled potatoes.
I still like their products... or did like their products, I'm not sure how this outsourcing will affect their quality of goods. It seems like they're stripping away the one thing that people still like about them.
Oh well. I wish them luck.
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
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.
Then it would be 3com.com.com
Fast forward to around 2001, when cards based on Intel and "Tulip" chips gained better driver support, started performing comparably to 3COM cards, and were significantly lower-priced. 3COM simply lost their competitive advantage. I think that most network cards are beginning to push the limits of the defined standards for 10/100 NICs, so 3COM will have to find a new arena in which to innovate if they want to regain their dominance.
My blog
US Robotics secured major tax incentives from my town (Mt. Prospect, IL) and was expected to employ many engineers, etc.
Shortly after 3Com acquired USR, they abandoned that facility, and it lay idle (and earning little tax for the community) for more than a year. It's now occupied by Skil/Dremel, and I wouldn't be surprised if further tax incentives were given to move them in.
Sure, USR was getting to be a dinosaur when they were acquired (what's a modem without a cable, these days?), but 3Com really abandoned us here.
Design for Use, not Construction!
The differentiating aspect of tech firms is that many have huge cash hordes from the .com bubble that will sustain long past their expected expiration date. Sun for example will take at least a decade to die given their cash horde, notwithstanding their inability to generate profits.
Of course that idea died and few companies are splitting off their best tech at this point.
I had the (mis) fortune to work on an old 3Com Netbuilder router, way back in 1995. It was the first router I'd ever configured, so I didn't know any better. Let me just tell you..what a complete piece of CRAP! To start with, the damn thing booted off a FLOPPY DISK!!! Lost your disk?..sorry, no routing for you. It went downhill from there..lame menus, totally non-intuitive commands, after a few days I wanted to throw that piece of $h!T into the parking lot and drive over it with my car. Fortunately, my second experience was with a cisco 2500, and there was no looking back from there. I'd run across 3Com switches every once in a while too, and they were total crap as well. The last ones I worked on about 6 months ago, I still have no idea why 802.1Q tagging is working, even though the lame-ass web interface says it's shut off. If 3Com wants to get back into the enterprise market..PLEASE make products that don't use a web-interface. Or if they do, at the very least make what shows up in the web interface at least RESEMBLE what you find in the CLI. And speaking of CLI's, how about a "write terminal" command, so you can actually look at the damn config without having to poke thru 49 different menus, writing the settings down each step along the way. That's why I always tell people who need switches..buy cisco if you've got the money, or HP procurve if you don't. 3Com..seriously, STOP MAKING CRAPPY ROUTERS AND SWITCHES!!!!!
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.
"Why would you buy a network card when nearly every mainboard has one built-in? And even the chipsets are losing to Intel..."
Because the add-on can do things that the built-in can't e.g. hardware cryptography (VPN, RIAA, hint, hint).
My experience with 3com is that manufacturing quality is extremely bad and design is at least questionable.
.25mm space to a grounded plate and on touching the main chip was fried. Anyway, the switch chip grew so hot before, that it would probably not have lived long.
First example: We had 10 3com network cards, with consecutive serial numbers. Some were faster, some slower and some killed the router interfaces because they produces so many errors. This points to extremely high tolerances in chip manufature and very poor Q/A.
Second example: A 100Mbit switch, for office use. Because it had a substandard coil in a switching regulator it produced highly anoying noise. A replacement switch had the same problem. When I fixed it myself (by adding a filter capacitor that was part of the original design, but obviously removed to save money, in a higher price product!), I killed the switch, because the leads of a power semiconductor were not cut short enough. There was maybe
My bottom line: Whatever you need, don't buy 3com. Any no-name product out of Asia is better quality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
In my book, 3com is still respected and revered
but in my experience so far, overpriced. or were, anyhow. When I signed up to Broadband a couple of years back, the installation engineer couldn't get a 10/100 to install in my box, so he zipped out to the van and got a 3Com 10-baseT card and installed that. went smoothly, right up until I got the invoice.
the 10Base-T was more than three times the cost of the faster card from a competitor, which incidentally I went out and bought later and installed in like 5 minutes. But Telstra's crappy service is another story.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
PSI, Enron, 3Com. Seem like buying the name to a stadium is the kiss of death. Some lame ass marketing guy buys the rights to his favorite team's stadium. Oh well. It's the 49ers. They deserve to associated with losers.
Posting as AC for job protection
I work for NCR, a technology company that is a century plus old.
Some founders of other big shot companies learned all the tricks in the school of this company, like Watson, who later founded IBM
NCR was always a conservative styled company, focussed on profit and not growth.
Despite that, we had our share of innovation. NCR invented the now ubiquitous SCSI standard. It also invented the first commercially available 32-bit processor.
Because they are conservative, they never broke into markets they had products for earlier than anyone else. The 32-bit processor ended up powering minis and mainframes made by NCR, and another company in the UK, and that is it.
NCR used to make disks and storage arrays, printers, microelectronics, and much more.
After the AT&T merger in the early 1990s, the old guard management was replaced and a clown by the name of Jerre Stead was brought in. He was more like a TV evangelist than a CEO, and left the company in ruins.
Jerre sold off the storage business (later to become Symbios and now LSI Logic), the microelectronics, and the printers.
After the trivestiture (AT&T spinning off Lucent and NCR), a Swedish guy by the name of Lars Nyberg was brought in. He announced that NCR was exiting the PC business, then later the server business, then we stopped making computers altogether.
The whole dot com era just passed us by, with nothing affecting us positively.
I think the idea was to make us attractive by being profitable, so someone will buy us. However, this did not pan out.
We are not losing money, but I doubt that we will survive for much longer. There are no new products being designed, no R&D spending, outsourcing to India is the name of the game.
This down spiral happened to other companies. For example Sperry Univac became Unisys, and now they are not really into computers. Data General, Bull, Bouroughs, DEC,
NCR will cease to exist soon in my opinion.
It really hurts to see a company going down like this from its former greatness.
The 3com Sega ?
I was trying to think of a cool switch that was 3 times as good as a Cisco but failed because Cisco said they'd have something better in a year or two...which ended up being as good but definitely not better...yeah..
There are many situations where I need more than one card. Onboard NICs, especially when they're Realtek, are terribly unreliable as well (the failure rate for onboard Realtek I've dealt with may be as high as 1 in 4). As much as you'd like onboard Intel, don't count on it in most boards when a manufacturer can save $3.
/do/ you care about?
3Com's problem? Go find their product on a big box store shelf. IF they have it (most won't carry it - it simply won't sell and shelf space commands a premium), it's $59-$79 per unit, compared to $16.95 to $19.95 a unit for Belkin/Dlink/Linksys. Often consumers can find a $5 to $15 rebate (combination of in-store and mail in) on top of that price.
According to 3Com's reps I've talked with lately, this is not viewed as a problem "because that's a market we don't care about anymore." Obviously, as you don't compete. But what
Filing patents. Honestly, check this link. It would appear to some that 3Com's heading down the path of the future dot-com: the tech litigator/patent holding company. (Good news: David Boies might have another client after SCO can no longer pay his rates)
3Com's been pushing firewall on a stick. Embedded firewall (via proprietary standard) technology, which has a little appeal but is too esoteric for the PHBs, and too lacking interoperability for the geeks. The current employment market makes it somewhat unwise for the recommender geek to push a hard to explain proprietary niche product to the boss when everyone else's product interoperates just fine (at a much lower price) without this feature.
The Chinese will steal'em blind. They can kiss their IPs goodbye. Watch'em lose their shirts in China...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Cisco vs. 3com:
Recently I found out that our NBX call processor software has a DOS vulenerability. It wasn't a real big deal since the call processor isn't accessible via the internet, but since i'm a good network admin, I want to patch the box anyway. I go to 3com's website thinking I can download the updated code right? - Wrong. I had to call my "authorized reseller" and get the code from them. This just gave my reseller an excuse to come visit me and try to sell me more crap.
Cisco, on the other hand, makes you buy a yearly support contract (not too expensive), and they give you access to their TAC site. Login to TAC, download updated software, install updated software - done.
I'm a corporate customer and I like Cisco's method of support. I suspect alot of 3com customers feel the same.
3com are you listening? I don't want to call a salesperson every time I need to patch a box!
-ted
The joint venture with Huawei lets 3Com ride shotgun over product development while ridding its own payroll of expensive engineering talent and manufacturing plants.
"A Chinese engineer costs one-sixth of an American engineer..."
"A year ago 3Com had about 300 engineers on its payroll developing product. Today, we have closer to 900 engineers working on our behalf. Yet the cost of this is all off our books," Claflin says.
Nuf' said.
Your book must be really short.
I like 3Com NIC's. Been solid and supported in every OS I've used them in.
Then there's the switching gear. Horrible CLI. Prone to lockups.
I know of a large university that got stranded by 3Com. Their network is ATM backbone, Corebuilder 9000's, etc. Turns out that their particular setup exposes a nasty little bug in the OS, causing the whole core to lock up every 2 or 3 days. Has to be powered cycled to get it going again.
So they call support. Support says "So sorry, we dropped support for our Enterprise equipment last week, the service contract you've been paying isn't worth the paper the purchase order was written on anymore. Thanks for calling, have a nice life".
Last I heard, they had been dealing with this for 3 years due to lack of funding. They did this to a LOT of people. 3Com will not be getting business from me anytime soon.
Strangely enough, I had a similar conversation just yesterday. We have some really old industrial computers at work that still run DOS and can't be upgraded because they're running specialized software. We need to get the data into our servers quickly so we were installing D-Link cards into them, and one of the guys remarked, "Shouldn't we be using 3Com cards since these computers are like 10 years old?"
I did considerable work on that product while at Ford Aerospace. Basically, I had to overhaul TCP, and wrote ICMP and UDP from scratch. We used this internally within Ford, but couldn't sell it or give it away, since UNET was proprietary.
Bill Joy's TCP implementation in BSD came years later. But because he was funded to give it away, it became popular, even though it sucked until the second release of 4.3BSD.
....that their biggest enemy was Intel.
They were right, as Intel went and built their own NICs into Intel-branded boards and took away a huge add-in market. The problem's even more obvuious in the notebook market where there are Centrino solutions from Intel, and other third-party wireless solutions - but nothing from 3Com.
Then again, who can blame them?
Now even the tethered Ethernet chipsets are too commoditized for Intel to be using their own in the D875PBZ series mobos.
Not that 3Com's been especially savvy or well-behaved about it all. They seem to have a bipolar problem... they would do great "engineering" products that were crap for the market they were intended (managed home office NICs anyone?) or they would completely miss segments they could do well in (such as HP did with their ProCurve switches) which came in at only a modest premium over 3Com's hub products when they were introduced.
As plenty of other posters have mentioned though - you get what you pay for.
Try and run an intensive app like eEye's Retina using built-in (or soft-NICs), and get ready to lose any other connection pending until the app has finished doing its thing.
To have ambition was my ambition.
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.
These guys are launching the NS-5 in July.
Positronic CPU with over 1TB. Free lifetime OS updates, with instantaneous wireless downloads! They have interviews with the top designers/execs.
You can even build your own!
http://www.irobotnow.com/en_us/main.html
I would not be too concerned about the future of the U.S. Robotics company.
The next pasture is always greener
I used to work for 3Com as a tech support bob; I was one of the people laid off in 2000 when they wimped out of the medium and big-end market.
It was a pretty strange day; we got in to work as normal, only to hear wild rumours about the US HQ EOL-ing entire families of projects - including some brand new ones like the Corebuilder 9000 (and some ancient ones like the Netbuilder II).
We were told that there was an announcement downstairs; at which point they laid out the whole gory mess to us; massive layoffs, company shrinkage and retreat-in-confusion from the majority of 3Com's market areas.
As tech support, we were given three months' notice with the possibility of moving to support small hubs and low-end kit (not exactly a challenging prospect!); what most of our lot did was get straight on the phone to ex-colleagues working for Cisco.
What really got us down over the next week or so was speaking to customers. There were multi-billion dollar customers who we knew well and got on with; and 3Com's sales people had been selling them new Corebuilders the week before; suddenly, they had no upgrade path, they'd invested millions of pounds uselessly, and they were not happy with us. A couple of the bigger companies were demanding that Eric Benhamou fly over in person and tell them exactly why 3Com had sold them something one week and discontinued it the next.
(The understanding customers at least told us that they didn't blame us for random acts of management; but it still wasn't fun for us; the company we were a part of was pissing all over our customer base, and we were at the front line as public-facing employees.)
There were days during my four years at 3Com when announcements went round that made my blood run cold. The USR merger was one; 3Com putting an NT server (on a blade) in a switch was another; but the biggest one by far was The Day We Wimped Out.
I think 3Com as a company deserves a graceful death. I still insist on their NICs (which are rock solid and have never given me a day's grief); but I have no need or desire for any of their other products.
The whole Huawei tie-up is another Bad Idea, IMHO. I've had to try and configure one of those things; the interface was terrible (it was just post-Cisco-lawsuit), the hardware was laughably unreliable (bad mainboard *and* two bad interface cards) and customer support (at least in the UK) was pretty much non-existant.
Eventually, we ripped it out and replaced it with a Cisco. If 3Com are relying on rebadged Huawei kit to recapture their share of the market, then I think they're on a hiding to nothing, and the 3Com name will take another nasty dent.
They had it; they blew it.
Gideon.
If 3Com fails, it will be mostly from self-inflicted wounds. Anyone out there who works with Total Control gear and worked with it back when it was USR Total Control can tell you how badly service and support fell off after it became 3Com Total Control following the buyout of USR. My former employer (an ISP) was a 100% TC shop, but we switched to Cisco RAS gear instead, and the greatest (by far) factor in that decision was 3Com attitude.
We could hardly get anyone at 3Com to pay us the time of day, we went over two years without seeing out sales rep, and that was despite being an active customer during that period. When we started to evaluate Cisco, Cisco was all over it. If we had an issue of any kind during the test period, our vendor would take it straight to Cisco if their own engineers didn't have an answer. At one point, we were having some problems that would be solved by the latest code for our modem cards, and the Cisco engineer who wrote it personally brought it to our office on a CD-R.
Naturally enough, when it came time to make a buying decision, we were unanimous in favor of Cisco. That was about three years ago, so I can't comment on whether 3Com has changed for the better or worse, or is still that way, but the worst thing that ever happened to USR, IMO, was becoming part of 3Com.
I like 3Com gear - Total Control is great stuff - and I have a couple of Superstack II switches right here in my den, and 3Com NICs in a lot of my computers, but they shot themselves in the foot through greed and poor customer service.
Typically innovative companies are lead by their founders. Technical people who understand the value of investment. When they become large, the bean counters move in and the technical leaders are replaced with accountants or sales people who try to justify their position by generating short term profits at the expense of long term viability.
It takes a few years after the change in leadership has happened but if you're a techie at a company who's technical leadership has bailed or been pushed and you have a shiny new CEO from outside the company, it's time to smarten up your CV and have a look at how your current competition work.
Deleted
SCSI was just a rework of SASI (and, in the very early days, they were compatible). And SASI was...
(drum role)
Shugart Associates Standard Interface
And, at the time, Shugart didn't have shit to do with NCR. Al Shugart started with IBM, and founded Shugart in 1973. He founded Seagate in '79.
Shugart teamed up with NCR in, what, 1981 to have ANSI standardized the interface, renaming it to SCSI.
But the "invention" belongs to Shugart, and not NCR.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061