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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."

2 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

    --
    ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  2. 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.