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Cisco Plans Its Home Invasion
theodp writes "Despite lots of scars from earlier consumer craziness which included an Internet-connected fridge, Newsweek reports Cisco has set its sights on your living room, including videoconferencing which would let CEO John Chambers watch his beloved Duke basketball with far-away relatives. While recent acquisitions of Linksys and Scientific Atlanta make Cisco the only company that can come in on top of technology that's already inside homes, some skeptics say speaking to the consumer is simply not in Cisco's genes."
Just because the CEO thinks something is cool doesn't mean the general public will. I've used all kinds of high end video conferencing systems and none of them come anywhere close to replicating the experience of being in the same room with other people. And that's in a business setting. The difference between being together and being hooked up on video conference would be even greater for social situations. Throw in the lesser quality that they're going to have to go with for a home system over a business system for cost reasons and things look really dim. Which isn't to say there would be any market, just that the experience is not likely to be compelling enough to become a big seller.
Are Cisco intent on stopping all social interaction of any kind? If i want to watch the football and ogle the cheerleaders with some friends, i generally invite them over to the house, light up a barbecue and get beer out of the fridge. Cisco possibly suspect that we are all germophobes who hate leaving the confines of our house or interacting with humanity of any kind. Humanity may be evolving, but there is still that caveman/woman in us that needs to have our own social groups and interact with them. Half of the human language is based on physical presence, and this just takes all of that away. John Chambers must be living in some deluded Lawnmower Man fantasy land.
The only way consumers will have any control is if Cisco-SA-Linksys stay the hell out of the content business and have enough money and clout to tell the content business to get stuffed.
Otherwise it's Sony all over again. The consumer isn't seen as the real customer.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Microsoft, Intel, AMD and now Cisco all have this strange belief (mostly via their idiot CEOs) that they're going to make this triumphant entry into peoples' living rooms. I'm afraid they are PC software and hardware companies, and nothing more. They just don't have what it takes in the same way as Apple, LG and other consumer electronics companies do.
There's also the issue of the use OF DRM, and the paradox that the only way you can make a digital home is to make content flow like water i.e. it's free (like peoples' MP3 collections today) or ridiculously cheap. There's no way that's going to happen legitimately.
There's also the issue that the average home user can't afford a home network, a central Windows Media server or ridiculously expensive Cisco equpment.
These silly PC companies are all pissing patterns in the snow.
Cisco obviously has the technology, it's the marketing that needs to change. I guarantee that my mother would have trouble identifying Cisco's core technology and even if she knew of their domain, would have trouble identifying them as a brand she should look for at Best Buy. -- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/
(previously on Slashdot...) Non-business customers won't tolerate the scam that Cisco make you go through when buying second-hand kit -- that they make sure you "relicense" the embedded software to the new owner when selling on your old kit (the software that's completely irrelevant to anything other than the hardware they sold it with). The list price of a "relicense" is usually 60-90% of the original hardware cost ... Cisco say they're only getting what's due to them but it's just rather dubious attempt at control over a legitimate after-market.
I'm not sure that the business culture that produced this kind of revenue scraping is going to know how to sell to the general public.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting