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Cisco To Challenge iPad With Cius 'Business Tablet'
GMGruman and several other readers noted Cisco's announcement of the forthcoming 7-inch Android-based iPad challenger, the Cius, which "... will offer multiple networking capabilities, keyboard and mouse support, and the ability to do videoconferencing. Cisco says it will cost less than $1,000, or about the same as an iPad. The Cius will come with a front-facing high-definition video camera that can record 720p video at 30 frames per second and a 5-megapixel camera at the back that can capture high-quality video and still images. Users will be able to engage in live video calls [most likely via WebEx] when the tablet is docked or being held. Some units will be available this fall, though general availability is not expected until early 2011."
I would bet everything I could turn to cash that this will fail. As in: Will have the same or less impact on the iPad as mp3 players had on the iPod during the last 10 years.
This isn't news for nerds, this is fantasy capitalism!
"Oh please, please, let this be a robust market!"
"Fuck you. Buy an iPad."
Maybe I'm just getting too old for this shit.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Is Cisco going to make sure it runs only nigger-free code runs on this tablet?
"Under $1k' (read $999) is what everyone thought the iPad would sell for.
But actually it's half that much, $500 for the base model (which I have and is fine).
It is interesting though they seem to be aiming this at video conferencing users, it could be a lot easier to set up and use than existing solutions.
Until the iPad 2 with Facetime comes out that is... 2011 seems like Cisco is cutting it close.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Looks like Cisco's CEO got told
Like the comment above says, "under 1000" is corporate speak for ~999. If the iPad sold for 999 dollars, you wouldn't see 3 million sent out the door in three months. As for the other features. Great. I hope they succeed. I hope they manage to make a tablet which can compete against the April 2010 release of the iPad by early-2011. Of course, by then they will be competing with the next refresh of the iPad.
Even then, the touch tablet ecosystem needs some competition so that consumers on the margins can actually switch platforms without switching device classes. I don't plan to drop my 16GB iPad for a netbook, but I might buy an android touch tablet if they made one worth a damn.
Cius Fail Though seriously.. the big ass speakers would be nice for a teleconference application.
it will end up making them 1percent(if they're lucky) of the money the Ipad is making apple.
This is completely bizarre. Cisco doesn't have a history of making consumer grade products. And they decide to dive in with an Android tablet? WTF?
They could probably duplicate the hardware, but I doubt Cisco could make anything like iOS.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Why would Cisco use Android? If they seriously want to compete with the iPad, they need to make it run ios.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
It's targeted to business users. Apple doesn't really enter into that market. So I could see this being a success.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I don't know anyone who's bought a tablet or an iPad. I'll bet Apple has only sold a few hundred iPads with their proprietary OS and software, all to those fanboys. But I'll bet if Apple used OSS, like maybe some kind of Ubuntu tablet OS, they could probably sell thousands.
Unless Citrix has some real aces up their sleeve, this one is exactly as dead in the water as Apple feels like making it, outside of a few big corporations where just repeating "Cisco, cisco, cisco" in a soothing voice makes management's eye's glaze over and fills them with an irresistable urge to sign purchase orders.
The iPad is a relatively mass-market consumer product, based on a weedy little ARM core(very closely shared with another mass-market consumer product they produce). No way will Cisco be beating them on price, unless they are willing to get hammered on margins. Further, it is a general-purpose computer, crippled only as much as Apple wants it to be(for instance, this Cisco thing supports a mouse and keyboard for doing remote desktop/virtual terminal stuff. If Apple felt threatened, they could have deals inked with Citrix and VMware for their thin-client computing protocols, plus RDP and X11 and maybe NX, all rolled up into an app inside a month(App slogan: "Tenfootpole: for when you need to work on a PC; but can't bear to touch one...). I'm guessing that support for bluetooth mice could be added to the present support for bluetooth keyboards in even less time, and made available privately to that app, so as not to slum up the "touch experience". If they were really feeling motivated, they could kick out a full desktop dock accessory(the camera connect kit shows that there is USB host support in there, so it would take about ten minutes to design a dock with a power brick and USB hub, that holds it at the right angle and lets you plug in your mouse, keyboard, and flash drive full of boring work.
Now, there is no evidence that Apple is thus motivated. If they don't find the corporate market interesting or sufficiently profitable, they just won't bother. Even so, announcing that you plan to release a product when your competitor already has a product that is one software update away from being cheaper and better than that product, seems like a rather dubious move. I certainly wouldn't want to be in Cisco's shoes here.
that is one software update away
I would like to see the software update that gives ipads front/back-facing video cameras...
-- the cake is a lie
You know when the Man pulls this out he is saying he has very important video conferencing to do.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Cius Baltar?
Or Toyota Cius?
Edith Keeler Must Die
This tablet is meant to replace IP phones, videoconferencing gear, and thin clients in businesses.
User Access Verification
Password:
sparky>enable
Password:
sparky# config term
sparky(config)# interface Gi0/44
sparky(config-if)#
Oh the fun I'd have with my Cisco tablet :)
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Lenovo's new Ideapad which will be out later this year:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/05/lenovo-ideapad-u1-hybrid-hands-on-and-impressions/
It was supposed to come out about now but they decided to replace the snapdragon OS with Android. I showed this to my manager, the IT staff and we all can't wait for it. Especially now that Android will be on it.
The price is supposed to be around 1K as well.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Content, content, and content. Apple has at least a five year head start over anyone else in the tablet market except Google (they only have a three year head start on Google).
Their terrible name is already worse than Apple's terrible name, so I'd say it's getting to be competitive even at this early stage.
sic transit gloria mundi
Cisco want to be more than just routing and switching and need to stay relevant with all the new ways/devices which connect to the corporate network/cloud. I think this is a good move for them.
If this device is:
Reasonably Priced
Easy to buy
Easy to use
Gets the tick from Security
then - I want.
If any of these companies learned anything at all from Apple, they wouldn't be announcing tablets to ship next year. They'd be announcing finished products that will be out this month. You can't build a product and aim at a moving target.
HP Slate with Windows 7? Dead, and HP bought Palm to recover. Lenovo Ideapad? Announced at CES, still not out, supposedly a new OS is coming. Cisco Cius? Looks cool, not out until next year.
iPad? Over 3 million of them shipped so far, they were in users' hands 10 weeks after they were announced, and by the time most of these competitors ship (if they do at all), Apple will have a second release of the shipping OS and may well have a second generation of the hardware out as well.
The only thing Apple's preannounced several months ahead of time in recent years was the original iPhone. For a reason - that froze the smartphone market for almost six months until the first one shipped.
Word to future iPad wannabes: Tell us about it when you're ready to ship. You're not going to freeze the market by announcing 6 months early. People aren't going to say "screw Apple, let's wait for the Cius to make tablets legitimate". You'll only look stupid when you don't ship the same product you announced 6 months ago.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Your buying the brand. There are heaps of other products out there that can do the same or more as a Ipad, that cost less. But people will always buy an Ipad over that because they care more about what others think of You when they see you with one, then what the device will do for them
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What if they load this sucker up with a special USB-to-RS232 for consoling, and a bunch of Cisco-made apps for plugging into CiscoWorks and other utilities network monitoring, remote management, VPN, and have it support similar 3G data networking?
If they toss one in with every order over $50k of network hardware, I think you'd be seeing these become standard Cisco enterprise management tools. All it has to do is interface with the other stuff Cisco sells, and it completely eliminates my need to haul a 15" laptop around for a console and network access.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
There are already dozens and dozens of devices like this one, tablets running android based on ARM processors of various flavors, made by no-name Chinese manufacturers. Why buy from Cisco for $1000 something I can already get, right now, from various made-in-China web sites for a couple of hundred bucks?
About the only useful comment in the thread so far.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Cius> enable t
...
Password:
Cius# conf t
Cius(configure)# addressbook
Cius(configure-addressbook)# phone bob 222-4343
^Z
Cius>dial bob
Cius>no dial bob
This is not an iPad killer. It's not meant to be one. I'm at Cisco Live right now and all the Cisco geeks are wetting themselves over it...but it's not even a competitor to the iPad. It's a niche product to work with Cisco's other technologies. Hospitals are going nuts over the iPad and Cisco wants a play in that market. They want these customers to buy the Cius just like they do Cisco wireless handsets now. Look at the promo pics, it's docked in a Cisco phone.
Different markets.
the app's for the ipad will ensure it prevails
.. some people think everything with four wheels is a Minivan. What a festival of stupid these comments have become.
Article has no mention of cellular carriers, which I expected since this news is breaking. I have to wonder if that $1,000 is a subsidized price....
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I think you need to start looking at the iPad knockoffs. The top of the line ones are about $300 and run circles around the iPad already as far as performance goes.
I was thinking the camera on the device might be wide enough to accommodate three-four people... that seems like a pretty typical number for most video conferencing, and the fact that the camera is 720p speaks to it probably being able to include a number of people instead of just one.
Although come to think of it, any video conferencing we actually did was more on the order of 20 people with equipment as you described... perhaps Cisco is just trying to make it practical for smaller meetings to also videoconference.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thought the U1 was scrapped. Yes they said they were moving forward with Android but I didn't see anything anywhere about that form factor being resurrected.
One big part of why the U1 had that form factor, was that it was really a Windows system and a Linux system - which I personally thought would have made for a pretty awful transition when you detached (nothing against Linux, it's just that the systems were too different to switch to on the fly). Moving to Android means they would not have to go through such contortions, and can build it cleaner based on one OS....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Cuil!
Since Apple makes $208 from every $500 iPad, you wouldn't need to cut the profit margin as much as you might think.
Yeah but here's the thing Cisco is missing (and what your post misses): There is NO REASON to have mice on a workable multi-touch tablet.
The input paradigm just doesn't work, I'm serious here. I work developing applications for tons of platforms, iOS included - you don't design these apps for mice. Hell, even the SIMULATOR has to have special features so you can screw with shit and pretend it's multitouch (you hold down buttons to simulate 2 or 3 fingers, god never thought I'd say that phrase :P)
But seriously, Apple doesn't want a mouse, and if Cisco designs this to work with a mouse, they're designing it NOT to work with multitouch, which places them where windows mobile was about 6 years ago. Oh, that is, unless it's just a fancy LCD without a power cord and a camera!
Just my $0.02...
I have this ultra fantastic piece of hardware that is going to be SOOOOO much better!
Where are the pics?
When is it comming out?
Seriously this sort of titalation marketing went out 10 years ago.
Either put up or STFU!
Cisco is primary aimed at business what they might do is sell these to businesses as communication tools or bundle them as part of a sale. It's basically Cisco not wanting put money in Apples pocket. So they will put out there own version to avoid reselling someone else product and dealing with compatibility issues. Maybe they might put out a linksys model you never know with Cisco.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
On second thought, never mind.
Apple's biggest problem is that Jobs is always pushing an agenda, and as a result crippling an amazing device. Does it really take that much space to include a SD card slot, a USB jack, or a webcam? (even my cell phone has all those). Is it really going to hurt the user experience to allow Flash or my own applications? The answer of course is no to all these.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
There's an app for that... Wyse Pocket Cloud does vmware view (PCoIP) quite well, and we are testing it for a client. They get a thin client that has crazy battery life in a nice touch screen form factor (and it works with keyboards just fine...). As a wireless thin client the iPad beats quite a lot of the competition in terms of ease of management, battery life, form factor and cost. We are putting them into production for a client and strangely they make sense. As for the whole USB port/hub/lots of things to go with it, if you need those just use bluetooth but really if you need them you should be deploying a notebook. BTW, no one uses NX and X11 for a "Business tablet" however i'm certain there are already apps that will speak those. It is a myth that apple has no inroads in the corperate market, I'm replacing blackberry BES servers for iphone/Exchange active sync left and right. C level execs demand that their iPhone work.
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
If i want to deploy internal applications that aren't just a web interface to my CRM system, without jailbreaking the iPad can I load those on my iPad or do I have to go through the apple store? If I can have my own internal application repository maintained by my own IT staff, that would seem preferable than to load some app into apples store...
I'm very interested.. but no mention of multitouch!?
Does Apple have a patent on the single multitouch technology in existence that works as it should?
I'm glad my HTC Desire (Android) has multitouch, although 2-finger limited. My next big multitouch device should recognise all paterns i could make using both hands, and pressure sensitive pens. Is that so hard?
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Great. Where can I buy it, right now? Emphasis on "right now". The iPad can be bought "right now", anything else is, from a pragmatic point of view, irrelevant.
This is a different product aimed at a different market. This is intended to be a combination netbook and IP video phone for business users. CIsco will sell it the way it sells IP phones: in quantity. You will not see this priced or marketed for single unit sales, but for leasing in pallets for corporate IT. The device was designed by the low margin (Linksys) division of Cisco and they have deep existing relationships with Citrix and especially VMware, and also all of the major enterprise software vendors. Cisco will provide Linksys style support for individuals and Cisco style support for IT operations with quantity contracts. The cash base they are targeting is the phone / video conferencing / desktop/laptop/netbook / etherswitch lease rollover money. And Cisco has the cash in hand (40G USD) to handle the leases themselves, like they do with their other (non-Linksys) products.
I would like to see the software update that gives ipads front/back-facing video cameras...
But it would be a magical update. And we all know magic can do aanything.. Like the one that was going to fix the antenna problem.. but because so many people complained. Steve is holding it back to teach the heretics a lesson.. He may never release it because we dared to question his great indefatigable wisdom... I'm sure it works perfectly for the truly faithful.. And when you have unicorns instead of icky old core functionality, there are no limits.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I can see Cisco having a niche market to Cisco customers as they can integrate everything nicely. It doesn't sound like a real iPad contender though. To me it sounds bulky, with fragile parts, and a clumsy interface with no price improvement. It suffers from the problem most iPad contenders will have - it fails to understand why the iPad is better than a laptop. Ruggedized is great but why build it as a default? Better it be internally rugged (no fragile/moving parts) and slim enough to fit into a selection of cases that can make it rugged as-needed.
The one win is the built-in camera although after a recent 4000 mile road trip with my iPad I would rather see a Bluetooth camera that can sit on top of the iPad and be moved freely. I'd have liked to have one sitting on my dashboard and integrated into my GPS program. The GPS app already posted updates to Facebook (via 3G) but it would have been awesome if it could have posted photo or even video updates.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You totally miss the point. You shouldn't have to move files around. They should just be there. Anywhere. Any device. That's where things are going. iWork is obviously going that way. iBooks too. iTunes is obviously neglected, and it sucks bad, but it's because Apple has all but abandoned it as they move away from it.
Apple clarified the rules. There is no prohibition on running interpreted code so long as the application isn't primarily composed of interpreted code.
The iPad works well as a business tool. Web, email, messaging, credit card processing, office suite, ssh, VNC, code editors, image editors, etc.. all there and gradually improving. So far the most annoying limitation I've noticed was actually from the US government and applies to all other apps, for any device, distributed in the US - stupid crypto rules that force every single app, even if using a standard protocol or code library, to get permission from the government to be released.
I've had the iPad for a couple months now and for the most part it's replaced my iTouch, netbook, laptop, and desktop. The main reason to use anything else is for when you want a larger screen or need more processing power but that really isn't that often and either problem can be addressed with a few upgrades to the iPad and iOS. You can hook a monitor up to it already but it'll be a while before we see the full benefit of that. I'd not be surprised to see a distributed computing library and possibly home/business servers made part of iOS - use the cloud or your local servers to boost the processing power when needed. Why carry it all around with you? For the rare times you NEED to encode that video right now while in the car 100 miles from civilization? I'd rather not have the bulk, heat, or weight.
The iPad is not perfect but I think it's the right direction. I don't know if Apple or someone else will be first to get everything right but it is a paradigm shift, combined with cloud computing, that I think will happen. It'll be at least as big as the invent of the web app. It'll take time to gradually shift users' expectations too which I think is part of why Apple doesn't move faster in shifting things. To sudden a change and people will be confused and resist. Also it's new for developers so it takes time to come up with the best solutions for the new way. I already did most my heavy lifting on my servers which probably has eased the transition for me. It's just a matter of time before it works that way for non-geeks too. Part of the tight control Apple is keeping is no doubt an effort to keep things moving the way they think it needs to go to keep the market from floundering the way the PC has. ie Printers, modems, graphic cards, etc suck because PC makers allow hardware manufacturers to do whatever the heck they want, without a real standard, with whatever crappy drivers they feel like tossing out. PC applications suck for similar reasons.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I mean, if you even /consider/ cisco gear, that usually means you have lots of other people's money and want a solution that 'just works' - Cisco does not compete on price.
Further, unless you are targeting /very small/ companies where the guy making the decision is the owner, and thus is spending his own money, competing on price is rarely a winning strategy. Corporate decision makers make decisions based on "what is least likely to get me fired if things go south" - joe middle manager is unlikely to get a bonus if he saves a couple million going with a cheaper router that works out well, but he will get fired if he buys the cheap router and it goes poorly. The value proposition of cisco is that if you buy cisco kit and it ends up not working? you are less likely to be blamed. I mean, it's cisco. It's usually pretty good shit, even if it is rather overpriced. Also, that's what everyone else is using, 'best practices' right? if the middle manager follows 'best practices' then he's doing his job, right?
now, the thing about competing on price is that in areas where there is quick innovation, you don't see a lot of companies competing on price, so often you can get pretty good margin while still flying under your competition. this is my niche right now; Sure, no large corp would look at me twice, but small companies do, and price-wise, none of my competitors even want to be thought of as my competitors, which is good for me. There is money to be made competing on price in markets that change quickly; it's just your customers, in that case, are not large corporations that spend other people's money.
but my point is that this is not cisco's niche. Cisco, in fact, probably wants to price it's product higher than the 'consumer grade' ipad. the cisco is 'enterprise grade' and we all know that 'enterprise' is code for 'expensive.'
VoIP handsets. it sounds like this is attempting to be an extension/ technological upgrade of that corporate communications device market.
HP has bought palm, killed their windoze slate, and is quite excited about what they can do with WebOS across a spectrum of mobile devices.
Things are going to be interesting in the coming year.
Forthcoming....in develpment...soon to be released...in beta testing...
Why do we even pay attention to any of this crap? I can make up specs that stack up well against the iPad, but unless the hardware and OS and apps are actually available for purchase from a variety of retailers *right now*, it's all just vaporware and a monumental waste of time.
Citrix already has an iPad compatible client. Android already has the Citrix receiver as well. Apple can't kill this even if it wanted to (they don't, it's niche unlike the iPad). Our company has a few test iPads running offloaded images of Windows 7 using Citrix Receiver from the app store but when I showed this device to our IT director this morning we were a hell of a lot more excited for it than the iPad, despite the fact we have a great implementation already running on it.
Sorry for using AC.
They will soon find out that their price point will have to be below that of an ipad, or they'll sell zero of them
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You're making a pretty big mistake by looking at this as an iPad competitor. I've seen the device here at Cisco Live, and it's pretty slick. The device docks into a desk phone-type system, so it basically serves as a desktop teleconferencing unit that can be decoupled from the base station and taken with you.
This device is only going to appeal to those organizations that already have an existing Cisco Unified Communications system in-place and already make heavy use of video communications, and want to be able to bring mobile individuals into Telepresense sessions and provide a cleaner solution for those who need to do desktop video teleconferencing. You can bet that Cisco will eventually release iPhone and iPad (once the iPad gets cameras or a camera addon) apps, along with apps for other cell phone OSes, that will provide tie-ins to the Telepresense systems (just like they already have apps for tie-ins to their VoIP products), but this solution fits a very particular niche in the voice and video ecosystem that no existing product on the market quite fills: a tightly integrated, function-specific mobile video telecommunications device designed from the ground up to work with Cisco's product line.
Cisco should call it the iBook, then license the trademark from Apple.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And with the iPad they have finally managed to get rid of every standard connector so everything must be bought from them or partners that they have approved of and taxed. Noting that the plastic charging base is $70 (Canada) you can see how it goes. Shouldn't that have been included?
Actually no, my iPad was $500. It includes a charging wall unit, which is really just a USB port - and also the cable that goes to the iPad. So why should a stand have been included when it does include a means of charging?
You don't need any of the other things either, or you can use much cheaper variants. Office supply stores have tons of things meant to hold up pads of paper or books, or to hold something the size of a pad of paper, and while not tailored for the iPad most of it works pretty well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your advice makes since for the consumer market but Apple's secrecy has significantly hurt them in the enterprise market. IT doesn't want to buy a bunch of iPads, spend money shoehorning them into their current VC system only to have Apple change everything with a moment's notice. They want products that easily integrate into their current system, and which have known support and upgrade roadmaps. Companies like Cisco and HP provide this. Apple does not.
...he works at a penis-enlargement factory, you insensitive clod!
Cisco has many cards it can play that Apple can not. In fact they will probably make quite a bit of money off iPad sales, because they make the hardware that the Verizon's and AT&T must buy to keep up with the bandwidth demand generated by all these newer phones. Most of the money to be made on these phones is in the cost of service, not the phones themselves (unless of course Apple can convince its customers to be constantly upgrading their phones every year or two and stay locked into distribution channels such as the iTunes). By playing with a wide variety of increased bandwidth technologies Cicso is in a commanding position to eventually corner more of the iPod market if later desires by more directly influencing the cost of the plans Apple customer's need to make their phones work. By just getting into the tablet market they gain valuable ties to a host of companies that would more indirectly interact with the underlying plumbing, which Cisco by and large controls given their dominant presence in that market. It also positions them better going forward to offering more specialized services not currently provided by the telecommunications players as these devices mature and spin of new services and technologies. I wouldn't be surprised if Cisco is already positioning a lot of latent capability into their products that can be activated later as these services and technologies mature.
By better focusing on the revenue from phone plans and implementing broader more open technologies (open in the sense that customers don't have to go through a single vendor to provide as with Apple's approval process) they lay the groundwork for a much larger presence in this market than Apple would be able to support, since they are forced to rely largely on telecoms for their network. Cisco on the other hand is in a much better position to control the telecoms than Apple, since they too rely on Cisco for much of the plumbing hardware. Strategically, this is good for Cisco, since it positions themselves as a major player in ALL segments of telecommunications, not just the consumer market, where new products and competitors can easily out-buzz and out-hype each other relatively quickly.
As more and more iPad-like devices from other vendors hit the market Cisco is in a much better position to steer bandwidth growth in ways that direct customers, but particularly very large customers to its products because they will seek more highly integrated, full-spectrum solutions rather than the lucrative, but still relatively boutique approach to a business focus that Apple currently enjoys primarily as a result of its excellent marketing. While consumers are falling all over themselves to get Apple products, few corporations are probably going to be satisfied with being forced to set up classes for their thousands of employee's just to show them how to properly hold their new iPhone. Broad scale more seemless technologies that scale more broadly will be appreciated by business customers.
Well its largely a question of scale. Sell (or let others sell) hundreds of thousands of devices that link to the internet and then make a fortune on selling the underlying high-end gear that supports all the communications. Keep in mind that Cisco makes money every time Apple sells an iPad or and iPhone. Apple and just about everybody else ultimately relies on Cisco products to get their packets moved around between customers they are selling to.
Remember, while the California gold rush got a lot of folks excited, the real money was in shovels and railroads. As far as the internet goes, you can think of Cisco as the railroad.
That reason is internet traffic. They want to drive internet traffic up and up and up. The control about 60% of the router and switch markets that provide the nodes essential for directing internet traffic. ATT, Verizon, Sprint want to build telecommunications networks, so they buy Cisco gear. So many see the internet as a consumer oriented application medium, but it is built on multiple layers, which ultimately rely on the lower levels of the network that directly interface with router and switching gear. Cisco is the 500 pound gorilla in the economics of internet plumbing. Yes there are a few smaller players, Juniper, Hwei, etc. but they do not dominate like Cisco.
If they wanted to compete with Apple more directly they could do so, but I don't think that is their intent here. Ultimately, they want to drive more internet traffic, since most of this traffic (about 60%) runs on (or more accurately through) Cisco gear, they are simply entering yet another slice of the telecommunications market and say, we will own some of this too. Few companies are in a position to do this like Cisco. They can because of the strategic position of their product line with respect to the underlying architecture of the internet itself. They are simply making it clear that they intend to directly own a piece of all internet related segments so that they can provide full-spectrum products that appeal to their largest customers and to better manage control of the growth of internet as a whole. Big customers are willing to pay big prices for their gear because it allows them to maintain quality of service with respect to the underlying network. These customers can't afford to be in the position of iPhone users in NY city for example, whose phone plans are constrained by ATT trying to save money by not putting enough Cisco hardware in place to handle the traffic. Apple users simply have to put up with or turn to Android, Nokia, LG or other emerging players.
If you look at their most recent advertising campaign its about new paradigms that broadband make possible. They focus their PR campaign on video-conferencing because it catches people's imaginations, much as do Apple consumer products, but the underlying internet gear is where they make their real money. They make the bulk of their money simply by driving traffic onto their equipment. With about 37B in cash reserves they do have a lot of money to set whatever direction they want to take. At some point in the future, say when republicans are successful in allowing corporations to regulate the internet without any kind of government oversight, they would be in a position to slow Apple traffic preferentially if they saw fit, although I would doubt they would want to do that as they make more money by simply by driving internet traffic up, not by owning ever last packet via closed channel deals. They needn't care too much what consumer products ultimately create the traffic to make their money.
But your network plan costs you nothing right? After you purchase the phone and start using it. Thats where lots of money comes in handy.
Corporate users would be loathe to buy into a product that is vertically closed to them from top to bottom. It would simply give Apple control over their bottom line as soon as they decided to change the rules of the game.
On the other hand, consumers don't mind as long as they get the coolness factor they are looking for. Its more a status symbol than an open platform upon which to develop an independent business, unless of course you are appealing to a small segment of the business market that is directed toward providing services to a captured market (Apple customers, who are essentially locked into the Apple ecosystem).
Completed the acquisition earlier this year. Its clear they will dominate business to business videoconferencing systems business.
Where have you been? Cisco bought out Tandberg last year and the EU and the US approved the sale earlier this year.
laughable that a butt-ugly monstrosity from the perennially uncool cisco could be considered a challenge to the ipad.
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