Cisco’s CEO is stretching his company in all directions. Can it hold together?(economist.com)
economist.com
Cisco’s CEO is stretching his company in all directions. Can it hold together?
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14303574
7 comments
Microsoft's present is Cisco's future. Cash rich but without any innovation. Just copying whatever the new kid on the block is doing. It's just one paradigm-shift away from obsolescence.
There's just a huge difference between the way those two companies do business. Microsoft builds things. Cisco buys them. They may have comparable positions in their respective sectors, but they have utterly unrelated business development models.
Cisco does build things. Lots of switches and routers, they are all built in China by Foxconn. I think what you mean to say is that Microsoft is a software company while Cisco is a hardware company. Two different ways of doing business.
No: what he means is that Cisco buys other companies - its growth has been fueled by continual acquisition of other companies. See the 170 references at the end of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_S... most of which are about single companies acquired by Cisco.
Comes off as a bit of a puff piece. It's interesting to contrast the perspective in this article with the employee reviews on Glassdoor.
Yes? No? Who cares? Take it to motleyfool.
Here's the situation they find themselves in: if they can control or influence the design of residential power meters, which are tiny boxes made by 10 different companies that cost less than $1000, then they can dictate terms for how those meters will talk to the utilities. And what they'll dictate is IPv6.
The result will be massive purchases of IPv6 connectivity gear, by utilities, from Cisco. They have to see it as a second ISP gold rush.
Since smart meters are deployed in only a tiny fraction of markets, but will absolutely inevitably be deployed everywhere in 10 years, it may be that all Cisco has to do to make this happen is buy a smart meter manufacturer; these are companies with (perhaps) 8 figure revenue streams.
If you wanted to get all blue-sky about the opportunity, you could point out that Cisco would end up with a second end-to-end network, including the last mile, that would touch every residence and business in the country, all running on equipment that Cisco had de facto design control over. What else could they do with that? Who knows. I'm sure someone there has some idea.