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."

Comments

Good move.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good move.

[crafty.munchkin]

It wouldn't have been such a problem if they'd kept calling things Linksys, and not put the Cisco Systems logo all over everything. Then releasing all the Linksys kit as Cisco SMB - that was just crazy.

Re:Good move.

[CAIMLAS]

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.

Re:Good move.

[arielCo]

Any manager that buys Linksys branded hardware because "it's made by Cisco" should be fired or demoted, at least given a single stern warning if you're feeling generous.

Re:Good move.

[MickyTheIdiot]

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.

Re:Good move.

[Sulphur]

It wouldn't have been such a problem if they'd kept calling things Linksys, and not put the Cisco Systems logo all over everything. Then releasing all the Linksys kit as Cisco SMB - that was just crazy.

A route to disaster?

Re:Good move.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't work in IT and am simply an end user, but I can largely agree with this out of my own experience.

I used to associate Linksys with something that worked, with no frills and a bottom 30% price tag. I just bought a router and would in the past have looked straight at the Linksys ones because it doesn't have to do any tricks. These days however I have no idea what I'm supposed to associate Linksys with.

Illustrates the value of brand identity.

Re:Good move.

[Tridus]

Since Linksys was actually a home user brand, that problem didn't exist until Cisco came in and started slapping "Cisco" all over the product.

Brands are targeted at a market for a reason.Linksys pre-acquisition made perfectly serviceable home user grade hardware at a good price. Cisco totally screwed it up.

Re:Good move.

[SJHillman]

I have a (refurbished) WRT150N, and have bought two others for parents/grandparents. With the stock firmware, they're everything you described. However, with DD-WRT, they've been some of the most reliable devices I've worked with, up to and including Cisco's enterprise hardware. I've had a similar experience with one of their newer models (E2000 or something? I forget the actual number) - ultimate crap with the stock firmware but excellent performance and reliability under DD-WRT.

Re:Good move.

[bleh-of-the-huns]

I disagree, I think the Cisco SG300 and SG500 series switches are excellent value for what they are. A good quality introduction into managed switches with a decent feature set, and essentially running catos light (okay maybe light light would be better).

I picked up 2 of them on Amazon a while back (20 port and 10 port), and they are perfect for the small business. The downside (at least from Cisco's standpoint), is that had they not had they not purchased Linksys, and retool the business class products into Cisco branded slightly upgraded small business devices at a much cheaper price point, those same businesses may have actually purchased the lower end Cisco enterprise products (Catalyst etc) at a much higher price point.

So the move probably cannibalized some of those sales.

Either way, having used Cisco, Juniper, Extreme, Fore and many more in a past life, I can say that the SG series are at least decent pieces of equipment. However, a caveat is that I never used Linksys business products before Cisco bought them, so I do not know how much better (or potentially worse) they have become outside of the pricing of said devices.

Re:Good move.

[colfer]

Linksys did not precisely compete on price value. In the realm of stores like Office Dept, Linksys was top end. After Cisco, the packaging and casing got more extreme, comparative prices went up, all the while bargain basement brands went from unreliable to fine. Didn't help that Linksys alienated the tech-savvy segment of the mass market by killing the routers that could easily be converted to open source community firmware.

Re:Good move.

[Skater]

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.

Re:Good move.

[mu51c10rd]

A good quality introduction into managed switches

So...a gateway drug...?

Re:Good move.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm personally inclined to wonder if the Cisco Linksys acquisition was really an optimistic attempt to kneecap a potential competitor(Linksys certainly didn't have the really classy stuff, like redundant PSUs and such, nor did it have ios-equivalent commands to make your enterprise admins happy; but the capabilities of a relatively feeble ARM/MIPS SoC running linux were getting uncomfortably close to those of Cisco's ~$500-ish branch-office routers, and Linksys was putting out some definitely-adequate-for-the-money not-wholly-unmanaged rack switches and things) that ended up underestimating how quickly the utter crap segment would move toward adequacy.

Before the market's maturation, there was some genuine shit being sold as consumer network gear(and there still is, if you get unlucky, though it's harder to feel cheated when your $15 allegedly-wireless-N router flakes out after 6 months than it was back when your $80-$100 allegedly-wireless-B router flakes out after 6 months of only actually connecting to your laptop half the time); but the basic strategy of shoving a modestly powerful SoC from one of the major wireless vendors onto a more-or-less reference design PCB and equipping it either with Linux(on the high end) or VXworks(for the real cheap seats) is something that even the nastiest bottom feeders can usually get mostly right. The firmware will usually be terrible; but the nasty bottom feeders also have no real incentive to lock out 3rd-party firmware, which has gotten pretty decent.

If the consumer/SOHO networking market still looked like it did when Linksys was purchased, the buy might actually have been a good idea: assimilate the company that was getting a little uppity in terms of feature sets for the money, bump the prices on their classier gear, nerf the features on their lower end stuff, and call it a day. Trouble is, outside of the extremely low end(where margins are so tight that you can't even be sure that the wall-wart won't set your house on fire), shoving SoCs in plastic boxes is totally commodified and firmware(while each vendor seems to have a perverse desire to roll their own shitty version, rather than just slapping a lightly branded OpenWRT build on it) has gotten better over time, and still has a marginal cost of $0 to ship the nicest and most featureful build you have available to you. That's just not a place where Cisco can win: Cisco has a high-margin/lots of features market to protect, so they do incur a cost if they start shipping their good firmware on cheap hardware; but 'tenda' or 'trendnet' or any other "Who the hell are they?" outfit has nothing to lose and everything to gain if their firmware is as good as it can possibly be. They don't necessarily have the cash to actually write good firmware, and that firmware won't be running on good hardware; but even bad hardware can be pretty good, and the overall quality of embedded linuxes has gotten significantly better.

Re:Good move.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm sure it's undergone minor revision changes since then, But I bet the bulk of the hardware and software remains unchanged since 2003.

Just a note, for the reference of anybody reading this: The WRT-54/GL is very similar to the wildly popular classic WRT-54G that put the 'WRT' in 'OpenWRT' and 'DD-WRT'. However, the WRT-54G(non L) has gone through something like 5 revisions, and the later ones are more or less entirely different animals in the same box. Less flash, less RAM, vxworks(yeah, like hell it works) based firmware, poor compatibility with anything but the most stripped down 3rd-party firmwares. In fact, the 'L' model was actually a re-release of the older revision designed to cater to the enthusiasts who had been alienated by the later revisions of the 54G.

If you go shopping, just be sure you know which is which. I don't know how the 54GL holds up against the newer models from non-linksys sources; but anything being sold as a WRT-54G(unless it specifically specifies one of the earlier, better revision numbers) is shit and probably not worth the money.

Re:Good move.

[tlhIngan]

Just a note, for the reference of anybody reading this: The WRT-54/GL is very similar to the wildly popular classic WRT-54G that put the 'WRT' in 'OpenWRT' and 'DD-WRT'. However, the WRT-54G(non L) has gone through something like 5 revisions, and the later ones are more or less entirely different animals in the same box. Less flash, less RAM, vxworks(yeah, like hell it works) based firmware, poor compatibility with anything but the most stripped down 3rd-party firmwares. In fact, the 'L' model was actually a re-release of the older revision designed to cater to the enthusiasts who had been alienated by the later revisions of the 54G.

You need to know your OSes really.

VxWorks is a great OS - as long as what you're doing requires hard real time tasks. It comes with a relatively flimsy network stack otherwise (and there are MANY third party companies that do nothing but sell you a TCP/IP stack for such RTOSes).

The reason the "L" and original WRT-54G were great? Because they ran an OS with a decent network stack - Linux. This was basically a first at the time (and yes, Linksys shipped them without supplying source code initially).

And yes, the added hardware cost for Linux (flash/RAM) probably cost more than a VxWorks license.

These days, a lot of routers tend to run Linux, purely because the drivers for the new hardware are practically Linux first and the sweet spot for memory has tended to allow even the larger 2.6 kernels to fit just fine (a lot of high end ones have a whopping 128MB of RAM and 128MB of flash).

Re:Good move.

[Chris Burke]

I used to count on Linksys for exactly three things: 1) it worked 2) it was affordable and 3) it worked with Linux out of the box. I became loyal to Linksys back in `98 when I bought a Linksys Ethernet card that had Linux drivers on the install diskette -- this was prior to those same drivers being incorporated into the Linux kernel distribution.

Fast forward a few years, I wanted to buy a wireless card, and I saw the Linksys model. With the Cisco branding, but I thought, okay, so they bought Linksys, surely they kept the same features that I counted on Linksys for. And the answer was "no" on all three counts. Too expensive -- but hey, it'll work, and with Linux -- only it didn't work on Linux at all, and when I eventually found drivers from the chipset maker the card worked but then took a dump on me after less than a year (whereas I'm still using old Linksys ethernet cards for wired networking).

Firmware

[cgt]

I'm glad they're suffering. They deserve to suffer for their decision to force their evil cloud firmware on people.

Re:Firmware

[semi-extrinsic]

Or we knew that flashing DD-WRT instead of the PoS Cisco firmware would remove the problem within one hour of the device arriving at our domiciles. (I bought a Linksys WRT160NL just a month ago, works perfectly fine with a proper firmware. Current uptime 29 days.)

It's about time.

[philip.paradis]

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.

Re:It's about time.

[BlueBlade]

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.

Re:It's about time.

[philip.paradis]

Speaking as someone who deals with Cisco gear on nearly a daily basis, I fully agree with the premise of people needing to understand the difference between Cisco gear and alternatives designed for smaller environments. That said, most of the issues with Linksys products in recent years have been attributable to Cisco neglecting the hell out of Linksys branded product lines, and simply using the resulting failures to attempt to sell Cisco branded gear. It's been truly shameful, and I'd love to see it come to a stop.

Re:It's about time.

[b1t r0t]

Admittedly, one of the reasons Cisco bought them was because so many people didn't need maximum-speed minimum-latency ASIC-based routing (and certainly not L3 switching) in an era when 32 bit CPUs were cheap enough for consumer gear; being able to remotely get a CLI on a device in another city and individually control ports; or even the plethora of different standards to link multiple offices. (A simple watchdog timer would have been nice in Linksys gear, though.) A good part of the price of Cisco gear can be justified simply by not having to travel multiple hours just to push a button to reboot something. A lot of very small companies didn't need that, which is why Cisco was scared enough of market erosion to buy them.. But your example shows just how bad it was to forcibly re-brand everything as Cisco.

I'm sure the reason Cisco did the rebranding was simply out of their habit of Acquire and Absorb. This worked for enterprise stuff that was a somewhat niche market when Cisco bought them, when the acquisition was a good fit for their switching/routing architecture. But Linksys wasn't enterprise stuff. And Cisco didn't understand consumer stuff. Or the consumer market.

And then there was the "red-headed stepchild" angle. I was a Cisco employee at the time of the acquisition. We couldn't even buy Linksys gear at a decent discount through the employee hardware purchase program. I wanted a Linksys 24-port gigabit switch to use at home. Guess who I bought it from? Dell.com had the best price, and it was easier to order, too.

Re:It's about time.

[EmagGeek]

That's Cisco's own damn fault. The hardware in the Linksys is perfectly capable of doing all of those things, except Cisco simply chooses to disable that functionality in firmware to coerce you into buying the EXACT SAME HARDWARE with different, much more expensive, non-crippled firmware.

Even the cheaper Micrel or Realtek switch fabrics support things like individual port enable and PoE allocation, and feature-rich diagnostics via a serial register interface.

They're falling into the same trap that automakers are. "If you want a $400 sunroof, you have to buy the $4500 leather and NAV package."

If you want to be able to turn of an individual port, you have to buy the $5000 switch with eleventy features you don't want, rather than the $100 switch.

Re:Will EMC follow with Iomega?

[drinkypoo]

what are they supposed to be doing then? Holographic storage? Heh.

The right thing to do would have been to take the bags of money they made selling ZIP disks and invest it in next-generation storage of some kind. As you say, even holographic. This would have given the company a chance at a future, though they would have had to fire a shitload of people and go into near-dormancy when removable magnetic media got shit upon by flash RAM becoming inexpensive. Instead they chose the long road to extinction.

Re:It's about time. Indeed.

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

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.

Cisco deserves to lose millions on this

[Tridus]

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.

Wait, did I miss something?

[JTD121]

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.

Re:Will EMC follow with Iomega?

[karnal]

Which sucked, in my opinion. Zip drives and Jaz drives (and their media) were an excellent idea, but poorly executed. My first zip drive ate a few disks before I figured out "if I use this drive, it will destroy everything." Took it apart before returning it (hey, we all want to know the "WHY") and one of the drive heads was physically disconnected from the arm.

Had a Jaz drive later in life (donated). And you're right, the disks themselves appeared to randomly either not work or lose data. Almost seemed as if the tracking mechanism in the drive couldn't follow the pre-formatted platters properly at times. And any drive that you can't lay down the track (factory formatted) sucks.

God knows what's wrong

[Colourspace]

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..

Re:God knows what's wrong

[msauve]

That's silly. Cisco certainly has warehouses full of arms and legs, which is what they charge their enterprise customers, but kidneys? No.

The acquisition went perfectly.

[MobyDisk]

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.

Re:Will EMC follow with Iomega?

[snsh]

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.