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Cisco Exits the Consumer Market, Sells Linksys To Belkin
Krystalo writes "Belkin on Thursday announced plans to acquire Cisco's Home Networking Business Unit, including its products, technology, employees, and even the well-known Linksys brand. Belkin says it plans to maintain the Linksys brand and will offer support for Linksys products as part of the transaction, financial details for which were not disclosed. This should be a relatively smooth transition that won't affect current customers: Belkin says it will honor all valid warranties for current and future Linksys products. After the transaction closes, Belkin will account for approximately 30 percent of the U.S. retail home and small business networking market."
The Linksys stuff took a nose dive in both reliability and software quality under Cisco's steerage. Belkin does better for some things though they are spotty on others. They are a very large player and I hope they unfuck what cisco's been fucking up.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Cisco is to the consumer market what Oracle is to Java.
I was always confused with where Linksys belonged under Cisco. The not quite SOHO, not quite SME limbo was reflected on some of their decisions. Well, this just proves Cisco has no idea what to do with the general consumer market (E.G. The Flip).
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
I think I speak for many who have worked with 'Belkin' equipment when I say...
"Fuck."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Indeed. Belkin has been on my "do not buy" list ever since the spam router fiasco. Then again, I guess it's fitting, after Linksys' Cloud Connect WTF.
On the other hand, anything that won't run DD-WRT, Tomato, or OpenWRT is on my "do not buy" list anyway...
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Casualty In Senseless Chinese Outsourcing
Cisco sells Linksys
Yay!
...to Belkin
What in the actual fuck?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
>'This should be a relatively smooth transition that won't affect current customers"
Every time some corporate droid has told me this regarding a {buyout, merger, acquisition, sale, re-org} a major cockup has followed. The only thing worse is when they use the phrase, "transparent to the end user," and you know the apocalypse is coming next week.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Two pounds. Are you an American or something?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Don't be ridiculous. There's plenty of great routers out there. My Cisco E1000 is working flawlessly, now that it's loaded with DD-WRT.
Now, if you're looking for a consumer-grade router that has both great hardware and firmware out of the box, you can forget about it, but I'm not sure such a beast has ever existed. But there's lots of decent hardware out there that can be reflashed with an alternative firmware like DD-WRT. The enterprise-grade stuff is crap too BTW: I used to have a couple of Aironet access points and those things were a total PITA to set up because of Cisco's wacky IOS system. The hardware was really nice, I'll admit (all-metal chassis, kinda looks like something out of a UFO, could be dropped off the Empire State Building and suffer only slight damage), but the software and web interface were ridiculously bad unless you want to spend a lot of time becoming an expert in IOS. By contrast, DD-WRT does pretty much everything IOS could do (including RADIUS authentication) and it, despite being Free, has a perfectly usable web interface that anyone competent with computers and networking can look at once and figure out.
Actually, I have found Netgear to be consistently better than Linksys/Cisco routers for a long long time. Two linksys I owned would hang and reboo often in the 802.11g days.
Moved to a netgear 802.11n router and has been great.
Ever wonder why some companies seem to constantly be involved in acquisitions and dispositions, esp. companies whose organic growth has slowed to zero? It's because acquisitions/dispositions are a great way to create cookie jar charge-offs to hide underperformance of a company's core business. Now you see it, now you don't.
You were very confused, Linksys was a tiny gnat compared to Cisco when Cisco did the acquisition, Linksys cost Cisco $500M which was less than half of their net income for the quarter in which the deal closed. Hell, two years later they swallowed Scientific Atlantic which cost $6.9B.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Wonderful, now there's no good router on the market.
There never was, if you're talking Consumer grade. Belkin, Netgear, and Linksys all have shit models and a few good models, and for each model they have decent versions and shit versions. The only thing that made Linksys any "better" overall was the ease of loading your own firmware, but if you're not into that type of thing then there's no clear winner or loser. You really need to do your homework on specific models and not automatically dismiss or include any particular brand.
Another word of caution- don't purchase from discount retail outlets, especially Wal-Mart. They often will make such large purchases that the router maker will actually contract a special production run from an especially shitty chip production facility so they can give a really good price to the store. The result is a much higher than normal failure rate if you're putting any significant load on the equipment.
Another option to consider is to ignore the price savings you get for buying an "all in one" unit. You can really get a lot more done if you use a stand-alone wireless access point and hook it to a decent wired router instead of using the wireless router combo unit. If you're going to be doing a lot of switching on your LAN, use an external switch instead of the built-in 5 port one. Those low-end consumer models simply don't have enough backplane capacity, not to mention RAM and CPU power, to use all the options to their fullest.