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Cisco Rumored To Be Selling Linksys

Posted by timothy on from the buy-and-revive-the-linux-ones dept.

New submitter drdread66 writes "Cisco seems to be giving up on another technology acquisition. Hot on the heels of a full writedown for shuttering Flip Video, Cisco is now looking at another potentially huge loss from unloading Linksys."

7 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. It's about time. by philip.paradis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Linksys produced some decent gear prior to the acquisition. After Cisco bought the company, the default answer for any sort of serious trouble with SOHO gear became "oh, I see you're referring to our Linksys brand; if you're serious about small office or branch office communications, you need to upgrade to our HOLY SHIT THAT'S EXPENSIVE Cisco brand gear instead." This applied nearly universally to cases where a prior generation piece of Linksys gear had performed quite well in the same role. Here's to hoping the brand can get back to its roots instead of serving as a loss leader for more expensive gear.

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    1. Re:It's about time. by BlueBlade · · Score: 4, Interesting

      On the other hand, there's a reason Cisco gear is expensive: it's enterprise class. A few months ago I went to a client's site to help expend a microwave network. Prior to doing the upgrade, I asked what gear was running at the remote location. "It's all Cisco switches and routers!", I was told. So we start working, installing new fiber lines and antennas. At one point, I needed to remotely shut down a switchport in one of remote locations to prevent a spanning loop. I try ssh, then telnet, no connection. I try http, and what do I see, it's one of those "Linksys by Cisco" SMB switch. That particular model didn't allow me to shut down a single port, nor did it allow me to re-allocate the limited PoE wattage to new equipment. Also, as far as I could see, no real diagnostic info on the ports, other than a packet counter and up/down status.

      We lost almost 2 hours to send someone to drive to the location and back, just to unplug a network cable. Now, I'm not going to say that Linksys switches aren't perfectly fine in some small business environments, but once you start having a big network they're a headache. Rebranding consumer-grade equipment with the Cisco trademark was one of the stupidest decision I've seen a large company make. Every networking professional I've talked to thought it was a terrible idea; it's almost impossible to see how management could ever even consider the idea, let alone go ahead with it.

      It's decisions like this one that make me think that Cisco's hegemony in the network is coming to an end. You can't have management that clueless and thrive. Also, they're still acting like they're the only game in town, with prices that are borderline ridiculous and byzantine licensing rules (ASA licensing, I'm looking at you!). It's a good thing Juniper has grown up and is now making some pretty awesome routers for very good prices. On the switch level, Cisco is still ahead of the pack, but other vendors like HP are stepping up.

      I think it's sad, because Cisco hardware tends to be awesome. Hopefully Cisco can go back to having more engineers making some business decisions, because the current leadership certainly doesn't understand the moving market.

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  2. Re:Good move. by CAIMLAS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, that was never such a problem. Who cares about the badging? The problem was that Cisco tried to make Linksys products - which competed on price value first and foremost - into Cisco products - which compete on threat of failure and job security. Huge difference!

    The problems were:

    * they abandoned the home market through marketing and getting rid of all the products which appealed to home users
    * they increased the prices of the Linksys products - because, well, they're badged Cisco SMB now.
    * they didn't improve the Linksys products, they made most of them worse (the latest SMB routers are completely useless; I'd rather have a PIX501)

    It's not like Cisco has all that great a reputation in the SMB market, either. Fine for enterprise, but people who know SMB know that Cisco is stupid for SMB on so many different levels, the least of which is cost/benefit being so incredibly high vs. pretty much everything else.

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  3. Re:Good move. by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is just crap. The first thing that happened when Linksys was bought was that the quality went down the toilet. It happened *immediately* and too quickly for it to be a coinicidence. If there was and "dilution" problem it was because Cisco wanted it to be there.

    Linksys put out one of the first wi-fi routers that could be modified and had real power. The first outdoor wi-fi system I ever put out as a newbie was using WRS hardware. Linksys was a real competitor to Cisco as they were putting out very affordable hardware that wasn't garbage. Small business was using Linksys as an alternative to bloated and hard to use Cisco products.

    I don't recommend any Linksys products these days from basic 5 pt switches on up because Cisco made sure they were crap for their own reasons.

  4. Re:It's about time. Indeed. by Ritz_Just_Ritz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work for a large enterprise. We "should" be buying more expensive gear. However...

    We had a series of small conference rooms that often hosted meetings requiring WIFI access to one of our "play" networks that's isolated from most everything else. We bought a couple of the SMB Linksys/Cisco wireless access points. I believe they were about $500 each. We immediately had problems with them dropping connections, even with small numbers of users. A call to Cisco resulted in "um...you're at megacorp? Buy our enterprise gear. With your discount, surely you can "upgrade" for only a few thousand". And that was that. There was little effort put into solving the problem other than trying to shoo us into buying more expensive equipment. We ultimately punted them all, returned them for a full refund, and are now using access points from Asus that cost us less than 1/2 of the price and work flawlessly.

    Lesson learned.

  5. Re:Good move. by Skater · · Score: 4, Interesting

    May depend on the model, I had a WRT54G that I could ignore for months at a time, and typically it only needed attention because the ADSL line it was connected to got flaky.

    Heck, I'm still using a WRT54G (1.1 I think) for my home network that I bought in 2001ish. A couple years back, I updated the firmware to support WPA encryption and it still works perfectly - I never have any problems with it, I don't need to reboot it, it just works. (I should note I use it only as a wireless access point, not a router.) I'm watching prices on a dual-band N with gigabit ethernet router to replace it, but so far I haven't gotten around to it, in part because I hear so much that newer routers aren't as reliable.

  6. Re:Will EMC follow with Iomega? by snsh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Iomega's blunder with Zip was that for too long Iomega only sold them with external parallel-port and SCSI interfaces. By the time they started offering internal drives, PC's were shipping with 4GB hard drives and 720MB CD burners so 100MB and 250MB zip media was already obselete. I don't understand what took Iomega so long to make an internal version. Internal drives would probably be cheaper to manufacture and support, and Iomega probably could have made even more money with internal drives sold through system builders. Companies would have had them preinstalled in every computer, instead of having one or two drives shared around the office.

    I remember spending a lot of time messing around with Centronics extension cables and EPP/ECP settings on Windows 3.1 and 95 boxes to manage external Zip drives. What a waste.