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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...
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.
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.
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?
Then it would be 3com.com.com
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.
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
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.
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.