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Cisco Rumored To Be Selling Linksys
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."
It was a brand dilution problem and confused SME's into assuming that they had the Cisco Enterprise grade equipment when Linksys are just toys.
The Cicsco purchase of Linksys was closely mirrored by the EMC purchase of Iomega. Will EMC look to unload Iomega now? Anyone wanting to buy one would likely be interested in the other.
How's that cloudy, autoupdatey, monitorey thing workin for ya?
I'm glad they're suffering. They deserve to suffer for their decision to force their evil cloud firmware on people.
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.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Cisco never did anything with Linksys anyway. Cisco treated Linksys as a red-headed step child. Often the firmware updates didn't fix the bugs I was hoping. The IPSEC implementation on many of their Linksys brand routers is still broken and I could go on and on.
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.
They totally screwed up this acquisition from beginning to end. Back when they bought Linksys, it was a highly competitive brand in its market segmenet. Now it's a joke, with poor quality hardware by the standard of other home networking gear, overpriced, and features total nonsense like cloud-based router configuration that nobody sane asked for. Cisco's answer to all this is "oh, you just need to spend 5x more on Cisco gear instead."
Why would I do that in my house, Cisco? I'll just buy from the competition instead and wind up with a negative view of your entire brand. I don't know if Linksys has any talent left in the company after how badly Cisco has screwed it up, but I hope they can recover once they're put under competent management. I still have fond memories of the old WRT54, which worked so well for so many years.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
All the people here on /. should know that most recent-ish 'Linksys' gear is supported by aftermarket firmware; DD-WRT and Tomato among others. Granted, a lot of people might not know the difference, but they run much much better than the shit that ships on them.
Hell, I'm still using a WRT54G from forever ago, and it's been online almost constantly (barring my tweaking and futzing up the install occasionally) since mid-2005. No slow-downs, no hiccups (not counting misconfigurations), etc, etc. And this is old old MIPS with 16MB RAM, guys. You know in the newer (WRT120N was mentioned above) hardware should at the very least perform as well as previous products, if not better. But it doesn't. Flash your firmware, and see the difference. Seriously. I'm sure if they cam pre-installed with something like Tomato, out-of-the-box, Linksys wouldn't have this weird brand identity crisis. But of course, Cisco and open-source are at polar opposites of the world, it seems. Also, WTF Slashdot? It's 2012, please get a WYSIWYG editor, instead of arcane HTML formatting and such. Line breaks.
They could have improved the gui, maybe gone with some improved hardening tools like are found in the Cisco Works environment or the Cisco ASDM. Maybe borrowed some goodies from the Wireless Lan Controller interface. To me as a user of all the above, it doesn't look like they did much of anything to improve the Linksys brand other than throw out a couple 802.11N longer-range tools and go with the flow of everyone else for adopting WPA.
Bingo. I was at least hoping for some type of basic CLI environment instead of the horribly shitty http-based GUI's they use. And a freaking console port, for the love of all that's holy, instead of full in-band read/write access. But then again I work on Carrier grade networks, and working with the Big Gear makes me kind of spoiled when it comes to that sort of thing.
with my reading-fu, but I SWEAR I first parsed that as 'Cisco rumoured to be selling Kidneys'.. I mean, they really stooped low this time..
I have the Linksys E3000 WiFi router and have not had any quality issues. Part of this may be because I refused to install the push-based firmware that caused issues for a lot of people.
I did notice a lot of features being dropped from the Linksys line once they became Cisco branded. One of the biggest examples was removing CLI from some of the higher-end Linksys switches. Of course, this was to prevent a loss of sales for Cisco's enterprise lineup. The result was that a lot of SMBs went with Netgear and D-Link.
I used to work for a company that was bought by Cisco: Tandberg.
They cancelled all the high-end Tandberg projects because they were in competition with the products they had developed internally, despite Tandberg's products being vastly superior.
Cisco's products are crap but they want to brand themselves as quality, and they want all their acquisitions to serve the low-end market.
As a result all of the founders and star employees left the company. Several of them used the money they got from the IPO to make new companies in the same sector.
Cisco is used to fleecing companies just like Oracle does. Buying into consumer market will never get you those types of margins. (don't even bring up Apple, that fad is already on the down swing)
Even in the Enterprise world, there are good options opposite Cisco these days. I've replacement most of my Cisco equipment with Juniper and have been quite happy with them and in some cases far happier than I was with Cisco.
Whoever you were talking to.. you got screwed.. why spend $500 a piece for Linksys branded Cisco equipment, when you could have picked up Cisco Aeronet 2600's (or the equiv back whenever), for around $600, and that is not even the lower end of the Aeronet range...
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
I thought, "Man, they really are in trouble."
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
I never understood why Linksys, DLink et al don't push hard into brownware. Imagine a Blue-Ray with buildt in DNLA and powered by POE. Only one cable, no separate power supply needed. DVB-T? Put a box in the attic and connect it wih a single ethernet cable. Make an amplifier with a POE switch up its ass, and a DNLA client. Could be the start of a very nice product line.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Used to be if you wanted a reliable wireless router in your home, you paid an extra $10-$20 and got a Linksys. Belkin, NetGear, and most other brands used to crap, but now have caught up in terms of quality and kept their prices lower. That being said, the low margins I think are the other big reason Cisco is looking to drop Linksys. From TFA:
[The home-networking business] is a mature consumer business with low margins
From reading people's stories, it sounds like Cisco succeeded in every way. Linksys' made high-end consumer grade networking equipment. Cisco made enterprise grade networking equipment. Linksys posed two risks to Cisco: One is that Linksys could move into Cisco's territory if they started making enterprise grade equipment. The other is that enterprise users might find that Linksys equipment would be good enough in some cases, eating into Cisco's sales.
Rather than risk that, Cisco bought Linksys and ran them into the ground to increase the size of the gap between their enterprise grade equipment and the nearest competitor. If they succeed in selling the company off, they not only succeeded but they recoup a part of their investment. And if Linksys' brand is soiled then even a good buyer with good management will be stuck.
It sounds like it was a good plan.
It seemed like 10 years ago, Cisco gear was everywhere, even in small places -- because everyone had to have an access router and Cisco was a very common choice.
Once DSL and cable-based internet became common for business, Cisco started disappearing from those environments. Their PIX line had some penetration, but it was complicated to manage compared to a wide variety of web GUI devices and the support agreements were expensive.
In switching they seemed less prevalent until you got into organizations that needed L3 routing or extensive L2 management, but cost conscious organizations (common at the lower end) went with HP or other brands with similar features and cheaper support.
When they bought Linksys, I assumed it was to create an "entry level" brand with light feature sets or limited expandability to win business at the level that outright won't even look at Cisco due to perceived complexity and cost relative to competition from HP, Netgear, DLink, Dell's PowerConnect line, etc. In many cases those products aren't cheap but cheaper in terms of support and feature wise very deep.
It seems like this wasn't the strategy at all, just a "steering" brand to capture some of the low end market from a revenue perspective and try to convert these users into Cisco users. Apparently they've given up on this market.
They improved the product line by exactly zero. Other than the occasional theoretical speed bump borne of the next standard they never added a single feature or usability or new or interesting product to market. And they never fixed a single quirk or bug of any of the products new or old. My old WRT110 is as usable today albeit slightly slower, than anything they've brought out in since. And it still fails occasionally with ONE laptop running Win7-64 (but not any of my others) because it runs Access Connections. So if Cisco wants to junk it, so what?
I worked for Pure Digital. We made the most popular solid state video recorders in the world when Cisco bought us. From the inside it was very clear what Cisco was thinking. Cisco's consumer division was floundering and they had no idea what to do. Cisco doesn't know how to play in the consumer space. They bought Pure Digital in large part because of PDT's management. Pure Digital was a start up that roared into the consumer space in less then 4 years to become one of the biggest brand names in the space. There were surveys that put our brand name at par or above Sony. Kodak wasn't even close. At the time our camcorders dominated the Amazon top 10.
>> Cisco bought us and immediately made our CEO and entire executive team the head of Linksys.
The big problem was that Cisco isn't a consumer company. There's a whole different set of rules and Cisco couldn't cope. As a subset...
1) Margin - Cisco's margin demands were ridiculous. Impossible for a consumer company (except maybe Apple).
2) Timing - Christmas is everything in the consumer world. Cisco didn't understand consumer product timing..
3) Marketing - We deliberately pushed against Cisco's logo on the devices... we lost.
4) Consumers - Cisco doesn't understand consumers.
etc etc.
In the end our management came up with a few interesting things... Valet for instance. No more networking know how.. no keys, no configuration, no passwords. Just plug this USB stick into your computer and you're configured for the wireless router.. unplug and store the USB stick somewhere safe. It was the first attempt at making networking dead simple for the consumer but eventually PDT personnel got frustrate and people started leaving (right around the time the 2 year retention bonuses matured).
Cisco spent over $600 million on Pure Digital. The reported number was $590 or so but it was more like $650... Then Cisco took a $300 million charge to close it. All told their ill fated attempt cost them around $1 billion.
Of Cisco I can only say that they shouldn't have been in the consumer space in the first place. They're a mature company who's growth has slowed. They have a ton of cash and are trying to "invest" in future growth by randomly buying companies and hoping that one of them will propel their next growth spurt. They're tossing money at a dart board and hoping one of the wads sticks to the bullseye. For me it was eye opening when I first heard Chambers talk about how many market adjacencies (things not related to Cisco's core business) he was after...
Hopefully they'll fuck off out of the telephone and video conferencing market too. They need to concentrate on on selling high margin, high wattage switching products to resellers & distributors with golfing links to CTO's in large organisations with huge training budgets. That reminds me, it's December; my Cisco-Christmas-Spiv package should be here by now.
The Linksys SPA line of VoIP products were a real threat to Cisco SOHO market which was serviced by the Call Manager Express ISR. The inexpensive SPA9000 is a great little SOHO PBX that boasts a lot of features. The first thing Cisco did was to kill the SPA line and also any competition that it could do to its "money maker" CME line. Either they are really smart and bought out Linksys to kill it or so stupid that they killed it through incompetence. It seems to be the latter.
Doesn't matter: if you already own the hardware, and the software on it is crap, then it's far cheaper to download DD-WRT and install that than to go buy a brand-new router and hope it works better. Besides, even if you go out and spend $100+ on a brand-new router, how do you know it won't have a lot of problems too? You probably thought that when you bought the Linksys unit, and obviously that was a mistake. Trying an alternative firmware is free.
If you don't have compatible hardware, and you're cheap, you can also do what I did: buy something used on Ebay. That's how I got my Cisco/Linksys E1000 for $10-15, which runs great with DD-WRT. Just be really careful you're getting a hardware revision that runs DD-WRT properly; this takes a little research on DD-WRT's website. The hardware makers (all of them, not just Cisco/Linksys) constantly monkey with their hardware, making new revisions, some of which run alternative firmware great, and others which don't. If the seller's ad doesn't show the HW revision, ask him; if he doesn't know, don't buy it, because it's probably the one that doesn't support DD-WRT. The ones that do usually get bid up more.