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Cisco to Kill Linksys Brand Name
Mav sent in this article that opens, "In a roundtable with the European press, John Chambers confirmed the "end of life" of the Linksys name, being replaced by the new and redesigned Cisco branding." He explains, "It will all come over time into a Cisco brand. The reason we kept Linksys' brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there's very little advantage in that."
Does the consumer stuff get better, or the enterprise stuff get worse?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Borland - Inprise - Borland.
With their iPhone breaking network at Duke.
The uninformed user knows Cisco as "the network company that the Internet is connected with." Being able to put that logo on consumer-grade broadband and networking products would/will continue to be a huge boon for marketing. Had someone told me 10 years ago that I could own *my very own* full-featured Cisco router for under $100, I would've given a finger to sign up.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I never even think of "Linksys" when I'm cooking.
I'm a loyal customer who has used "linksys" as his nationwide wireless ISP for years. You'd think they would have sent out a letter to me or something.
or some notebook makers will find their brand equity digested by their purchasers (say hello to the *New* HP and *New* Dell branding).
Let's see.... YouTube goes to GooTube which devolves back to Google.
Branding has become a useless exercise..... brand assets are as good as the purchasing company's mindset.
So, listen up there all you 3rd-Mortgaged Startups: Make That Brand Count. But don't fall in love with it.
I'll bet DLink is laughing their butts off. Now they compete with Cisco instead of measily old Linksys. Whoohooo!
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Cisco definately does have name recognition amongst most consumers. I work retail at a location which sells a lot of networking equipment, and whenever people ask "What's this Linksys stuff?", I always respond that they're a division of Cisco. Most of the time, that gets a favorable response, and I see a good bit of Linksys hardware leave the shelf because of that fact. A good move by Cisco.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure some reallllly smart marketing type people at Cisco ran some sort of study or something but, Linksys is consumer stuff. Cisco is enterprise stuff. Why dilute the brand for the enterprise stuff with consumer-grade equipment being associated with the name? Then again, where is there more money to be made? Not sure I have an answer but I'd be interested in hearing what others think about keeping the identity separate vs. combining them into one. Seems to me that "Linksys, a division of Cisco" would be as confidence-boosting as calling it Cisco, to the consumer. And I'd prefer to know that if something says Cisco, it's the real deal, not some 60 dollar best-buy grade piece of switchgear.
Now people won't value my hard-earned Linksys Network Engineer certificate...
The best thing I see coming from this, there will longer be a Linksys WRT54G. After revision 5, it has to be the single crappiest router in history, amplified by the fact that all the chums at Best Buy own pre-version 5 routers, which are rock solid, and have no idea why I insist that any recent release is pure shit. They constantly tell my customers that it is the finest router money can buy, and my customers, being the idiots they are, listen to the minimum wage dumbass patrol at Best Buy instead of their ISP. Why people think a sales monkey knows more about networking than a networking guy, I'll never know. The end result is always the same, their service is fine, the router I told them not to buy locks up every damned day, and this is somehow my fault.
Even if Cisco releases the same router with a new brand name, there is a good chance that the sales drones won't recognize it, and I can stop saying, "I told you so," to my customers.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
rj
you do can have a crappy $20 (on sale at bb) home router that says CISCO Sytems on it...whoopdy do
it is kinda sad how much crappier the home stuff is built over the last few years as the home networking stuff became more commoditized.
my old RT314 router had nice rugged metal housing and plethora of status lights now you get a cheapy plastic housing and 1 light be port if lucky.... not to mention crap like the cutting in half of the RAM on the WRT54G and other bs cost cutting moves by linksys on that product making later wrt54g garbage.
but i don't entirely care cause i use a old PC / monowall for my routing / firewall needs. and I have a nice rack mount switch i picked up off ebay for very little...
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Pleeeeze?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Cisco has a good reputation in networking. Linksys, by my experience anyway, has one of the worst. If Cisco are going to badge Linksys products under the name "Cisco" they had better improve the service and quality of the linksys products. If not, when teenagers and uni students are buying networking equipment, the first experience they will have with Cisco will be a bad one and forever tarnish the brand.
Just take a look at all the complaints around the SRW2008MP ( which I recently regret purchasing ). Unless you have internet explorer, forget about trying to use WebView to configure it. It won't work with any other browser, so forget trying to use Linux of Mac or BSD or anything else. You are FORCED to have a MS Windows machine to configure it.
But I here you say, "It also comes with a serial port for configuration." Nope, that doesn't provide full capability to configure it either.
Cisco's reputation has been slowly been suffering in the last few years and this is a huge leap in the wrong direction.
Don't get me wrong - most Cisco stuff is still pretty damn good - but there are fairly reasonable alternatives nowadays and a significant amount of their stuff sells because their customers are running all / mostly Cisco infrastructure or someone recommended Cisco.
Putting their name on shitty consumer level DSL routers and 4 port switches isn't going help in the recommendation department - some of you know that purchasing decisions can be easily affected by some person who isn't all that technical (I saw Cisco phones on 24, they must be great!, etc)"
Of course, that works the other way too. I've seen people reject proposals w/ 3com because some shitty 3com branded consumer level lemon caused them aggravation at home. 3com isn't top of the line, but it was pretty damn good a few years ago.
One Cisco gets their first lemon product - and they will, because consumer equipment is cheap crap mass produced by peasant labour - that will leave a lasting bad taste in the mouths of the people who will make future decisions. And while Cisco consumer stuff might be a bit better than the other crap on the market, "not being as bad as ___________" is a really crappy goal to strive for (and when your competitors suck, it doesn't make a great advertising slogan either)
I don't expect prices to go anywhere but up either - when Cisco started putting their name all over Linksys boxes, the prices went through the roof (unmanaged, stock 16 port switches for $300+?). Same shit, but twice(+) the money. Not cool. People aren't stupid, they will eventually catch on.
I bet some consultant asshole and some fucking buzzwords had something to do with this.
"Standardized Branding" ftw.
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I was listening to a show on CBC radio (gov't-funded NPR-like radio in Canada) a month or so back and they had a marketing guy talking about the value of brands. The speaker asserted that even bad brands have tremendous value, because they need to be focused, not established. Establishing a brand takes years and a shit-pile of money, with no guarantees, said he. From this guy's perspective, there is nothing more difficult in marketing and sales than establishing a brand, where a brand is a gut feeling about products+prior experience+what you've heard+service+etc. It's all that stuff that is evoked when you hear the company name, see the logo, think about buying a product.
This is completely off my cuff, but I think Linksys is a very established brand in residential markets, where 'Cisco' isn't. My girlfriend's son (first marriage stuff) even called his wireless router 'the linksys' last week ... and his wireless router is labeled by Dlink.
He sure as shit didn't call it 'my cisco'.
I call this move a mistake. Here's a Slideshare doc I cam across a few months back; the writer can't spell 'Porsche' correctly, but nonetheless I think it's a good intro blurb:
http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
The linksys brand was solid, until their routers started using broadcom chipsets, and immediately began to suck. Millions of people who would have bought linksys if their "computer literate" neighbor had been able to recommend it thus did not buy linksys. Cisco, being smart MBAs with the souls of paperclips, have now decided to use a brand everyone still trusts before they pump up sales and ditch the company to toolish shareholders before retiring to Cuba.
Anti-Globalism
Black and Decker used to be a trusted name amongst professionals until they started making toasters, household electric screwdrivers, etc. It eroded the brand. Black and Decker then took DeWalt, a brand that had languished against its competitors, but revitalized it by becoming the new name for Black and Decker's professional line of tools. Same tools, just a new name to get away from the consumer-grade equipment.
The same may happen to Cisco. Sometimes it's best to have a "professional-grade" brand versus a consumer-grade one.
Click here to learn a little bit more about the Black and Decker and DeWalt name game.
I always thought the Linksys WRT54G(L/S) was a great piece of hardware. Admitedly, the default Linksys firmware was garbage. That's why there's custom firmware like DD-WRT or OpenWRT. Cisco should have bought DD-WRT or OpenWRT and used that instead of their own firmware, that would've been a good start.
More on topic, I really don't see the point of giving up a well established brand like Linksys. It already says "A Division of Cisco" with the Cisco bridge logo on both the retail box and router itself. Isn't that good enough?
...But when Cisco purchased Linksys a few years back I was under the impression that the deal was to leave these guys alone and give them alot of autonomy. I liked linksys because they were giving Cisco a run for their money in some product lines. Lately I saw too many Linksys products hitting the streets without being ready (WIP300 'iPhone', WRV200 VPN router,...) and I was afraid that something was wrong and that Cisco was taking over and the Linksys guys were muted from the inside. I don't see that in a good ways.
This may be modded as flamebait but back in the days when I ran an ISP, I know for a fact that if I had purchased Cisco products instead of Allied Telesyn, Livinston (Lucent) and others I would have run bankrupt, the price difference was 1:3 between Cisco and the other brands and I simply couldn't afford it. They are going to mess up the skinny athletic Linksys with their big fat lethargic ways... For me, Cisco is a brand name like 'Microsoft' but it really doesn't mean it's better...
As the owner of a WRT54G and NSLU2, I can run my entire home network on 2 linux servers consuming, together, under 20 watts.
Will the Cisco-ification of Linksys stop this from happening in the future?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Also announced was Cisco's plan to gently ease consumers into the new brand with a line of "Linksisco" equipment during the transitional period. "We'll gradually reduce the name to Lisco and finally to Cisco," said one brand manager when asked to comment. "Hopefully people will just think their dyslexia's getting worse and they won't notice until it's too late."
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
A bit late, i was getting used to the name Linksys, which imho stands for good consumer network hardware, whereas cisco stands for very expensive enterprise hardware.
I think it was fine the way it was.
Looks like a typical manager-decission "oh, we call it cisco, it will allow us to make it more expensive"
And it shouldn't now. Cisco is known for being rock fucking solid. Ok, you'll get haters that'll disagree but talk to most network people (and I know a few) and Cisco gets mad props for stability and features. A good quote I head about IOS is "It makes the easy things hard but the hard things possible." I really feel there's merit to that having used other enterprise level products that were much easier to setup, but then I'd get stuck on something complex that there was no way to make them do. This is what justifies their extremely high price.
At any rate doing this will hurt the Cisco brand. Right now there's a clear division: You get Linksys if you want cheap shit that will work pretty well but potentially have some really retarded bugs (try the web management interface on their switches some time), you get Cisco if you need a rock solid solution and can afford it. Good deal, and really clear to managers. You need a 48 port gig switch. Ok, you can get a Linksys SRW2048 for $800 or a Cisco 2960G-48TC for $3000-6000 (depending on discount, $6000 is list). It's easy to explain the price difference: Linksys is consumer grade, Cisco is enterprise grade. But what happens when they are both Cisco? The boss says "Well we don't need expensive gear, that cheap Cisco should be good enough, it's Cisco after all!"
What this can then lead to is the brand overall getting hurt. People get Cisco products that aren't up to their expectations and they start to think Cisco sucks.
When you make really different qualities of the same kind of item, different brands can be essential. For example Ritz-Carlton hotels are owned by the same company that owns Fairfield Inn (Marriott International). Well Fairfield's are low cost, low class places. Two stars at most. Ritz-Carltons are luxury hotels and resorts, five star stuff. That's the reason they have two brands (actually they have way more than two). You'd probably get annoyed if they renamed everything to Ritz-Carlton and some of them were ultra pricey resorts, and some were low class motels. As it stands, the different branding makes it easy to pick what you want.
How does this affect product reliability and quality? Will we start getting better stuff than the crap linksys junk I've had the misfortune of using so far?
Every single Linksys consumer / home wireless product I've used has been much more expensive and worse quality than even cheap taiwan made no-name brands or stuff like planex which costs 1/2 as much as linksys in terms of product life and reliability.