Cisco to Acquire Linksys 256
forged writes "The Boston Globe is reporting that networking giant Cisco Systems plans to acquire Linksys later this year for $500M, thus entering the consumer market. Linksys also has a press release. The good news is that those who bought a Linksys access point now have a Cisco access point for 1/2 of the price ;)"
Is Cisco the new Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you guys think of Cisco, as a corporation? I remember seeing an article on Wired years ago about how happy the employees were about working there.
Things may have changed now, though.
tmegapscm
Expect a price hike for Linksys equipment (Score:3, Interesting)
The good news is that those who bought a Linksys access point now have a Cisco access point for 1/2 of the price
That is, until Cisco raises the price on all the devices sold under its Linksys brand by oh, about 50 percent so that it doesn't compete with Cisco brand devices.
Will this affect network stuff in any way? (Score:1, Interesting)
Great... (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe Lynksys can support another platform! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, why'd you all get quiet all of a sudden?
Uh, I have to go...
Re:Is Cisco the new Microsoft? (Score:1, Interesting)
Not likely. Despite the complete and utter wreckage that the telecom sector has become, Cisco is still handing out bonuses to its employees. Basically, its in their employment contracts that if Cisco meets their quarter, employees get bonuses. Compare that to their colleagues at other companies...those few that are still employed have gone through wage freezes, salary cuts, etc.
Product line changes? (Score:3, Interesting)
Guess it will come down to if CISCO can leave Linksys alone or not.
Re:This Sucks!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? How is Linksys competition to Cisco. Linksys stuff is primarily aimed at the home/small office. Cisco stuff is targeted towards corps/isps/large installs. I've never heard an IT guy for a large install saying "Gee should I go with Aironet or the WAP11" or Joe Bob saying, "I wonder if it's worth it to pay 10x more for an Aironet wap vs the Linksys". Cisco apparently wants into the lowend market. Where you do have a point is to see how long Cisco keeps the Linksys name. Do you lose consumer familiarity with Linksys to push the "prestige" of the Cisco name?
IOS (Score:2, Interesting)
Cisco has had a "strategy" for a while (Score:1, Interesting)
look at the aironet products
look at the vpn 3000 (formerly altiga)
look at the pixen
look at the catalyst series (2800 was a grand junction box)
Just when the linky started to get interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
The single area where the linky fell apart was in supporting multiple simultaneous VPN tunnels. They have promised some new models to rectify this shortcoming. I suspect this is the stuff Cisco will kill.
The linksys stuff seemed to be on a growth pattern that indicated this cheap consumer shit was going to gain more and more functionality. Cisco stepped in to put the breaks on this trend. If they don't kill linksys entirely, they will limit its functionality to create a clear demarcation between high and low end. Linksys as an indie would continue to blur the line. Cisco will make the line crystal clear.
Re:Maybe Lynksys can support another platform! (Score:2, Interesting)
That's how I upgraded my WET11 to fix a security bug!
Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:1/2 the price, sure... (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally, I gave up and told him to email tech support. Turns out that particular card shares a plug and play ID with a card that takes totally different drivers. You have to determine the driver you need by looking at markings on the card! For those of you who have dealt with PnP you know this is a horrible sin. The whole idea of PnP was to let the computer figure this stuff out.
VoIP (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is Cisco the new Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's the (smart) Walmart way... (Score:2, Interesting)
Upon closing of the acquisition, Linksys' business will be operated as a division of Cisco, and its products will continue to be sold under the Linksys brand through its existing retail, distributor and e-commerce channels. In addition, Linksys will have access to Cisco's sales infrastructure to address international markets and the service provider channel.
so it seems to me that Cisco wants to leverage Cisco's MASSIVE infrastructure and buying power to increase the margins, while continuing the Linksys name to disassociate them from Cisco at the consumer level.
What worries me is that in my time at Cisco, they never seemed to 'get' the SOHO market. As I recall, Cisco has been in the SOHO area before. I'm not sure what happened, but I suspect the Cisco business model didn't play well and they backed out when it was clear they weren't going to make the margins they do on the bread and butter items.
Cisco has learned from the burst of the bubble. While the end result has cost some people thier jobs as they cut or trimmed product lines, it has also make Cisco much more aware of how and where it makes money. Add that in with the big slowdown in acquisitions and I would speculate that Cisco has done it's homework on this acquisition, and that they have a good game plan on how to proceed.
Based on my experience with Cisco and evidenced by a number of product line closures, I can say that Cisco may not have always put in this much though into an acquisition.
My guess is that this will be a good thing for Cisco and Linksys, and hopefully for the consumers as well.
Re:Is Cisco the new Microsoft? (Score:1, Interesting)
But, they sure are quick to drop the hammer if your business unit doesn't produce enough revenue. And R&D is pretty much through purchasing startups (after which sometimes all the original startup employees are no longer needed.)
They are also big into sending work to India.
Their stuff is priced pretty high for what you seem to get. And IOS is right up there with vxWorks (inside joke.)
On the AP side (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Now LinkSys is going to suck as much as Cisco (Score:2, Interesting)
On the high end, I emphatically disagree. Talk to someone who's administering more than one of the platforms you mentioned (3COM, Nortel, Lucent, and Cisco). Ask them which hardware is the most reliable, flexible, configurable (no Windows-only Java programs needed), has the best web site support, and in general, has rarely if ever let them down in a pinch? Their answer will most likely be Cisco.
And also, all you have to do to get routine software upgrades for Cisco products is register for their site, for FREE, whereas 3COM/Lucent/Nortel want you to annually pay for maintenance contracts, and if the problem/bug you're experiencing isn't fixed within that year, well, then, please buy another yearly contract, repeat ad infinitum. 3COM in particular has a history of deliberately screwing customers that had been with them since the beginning, such as promising an eventual fix for a UDP latency bug (a big deal among ISPs at the time because it affected Quake players, for example), but only for "current contract customers" and then about 18 months later, dropping that product (the NetServer) and replacing it with a newer one (the HiPER ARC) that wasn't backwards compatible, rendering all the users that were waiting for the promised fix out in the cold, and thousands of dollars poorer. Many of the people burned by this little stunt switched away from 3COM after this, but others stayed and now couldn't PAY people to take the old NetServer stuff off of their hands - it is utterly useless.
Lucent is better at least, because you can still get old Livingston and Ascend firmware updates for free, you just need to pay if you want software for anything more modern. And even though some of their products have been dead for some time (long live the Livingston Portmaster!) at least the legacy stuff is useful in limited capacity. A PM3
is still a great choice if you want to get a little POP going in an area where v.92 isn't much of an issue due to phone line quality anyway.
Re:Sweet! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all initial setup will be hard, especially if your rolling you own and not using a floppy router distro.
Secondly, it can be hard to avoid the temptation not to strip down the system to bare minimum.
The best thing to do is have two similar machines running the same OS, one as a router and the other on the inside of your network will development tools. Then you can recompile rpms, or rebuild your source tree if your running OpenBSD, nfs mount the rpms, or