On (2013-06-26 23:30 +0000), Dobbins, Roland wrote: > > But can cisco afford to have three quite similar product lines, > > that are expensive to maintain? > > Cisco isn't really a unitary company, it's a loose confederation of > semi-feudal fifedoms, each with its own P&L. Effectively, they're separate > companies utilizing a common branding/marketing framework and shared > administrative resources.
This has overhead and I can understand why some people don't like having competing products in the market. But I still think it's overall positive thing and not something you should change. I don't want to touch the technical merits of current portfolio (I fully believe each nexus7k, cat6k and ASR9k have market, but I understand how it can lead to a debate). What this situations gives to Cisco is ability to change, as dropping the ball does not mean your entire portfolio failed. When you have option to fail, you can be more aggressive with your outlook. Take Juniper, ok, it's not single JunOS by far, but it's mostly single RPD, which is extremely naive by modern standards, relying on programmers diligence on adding enough yields to the code so there can't be use-case where certain part of code runs long-enough to cause your ISIS or BGP to flap. Of course Juniper has technical competence to fix this, and redesign the architecture to be much more modern and robust, relying more on proven OS scheduling, use more than one core, use more than 4GB of memory. But as it obviously mostly works, any major redesign is huge risk, which would need very ambitious manager to root for, failure would be career-breaking. Starting new product family form scratch and take the ideas there, prove them or fail them and backport what works is much more secure way to do it. Another, similar beneficial point in fragmentation is, that every project has more competence/ideas than the product can implement, so some people are left frustrated as they don't have chance to contribute at the level they want to. With fragmentation you have more surface where talent can prove their ideas. I believe this is major reason why Linux is such a success, clearly GPL is inferior license to BSD from business POV, but because Linux is so fragmented it receives lot more time from top-tier talent. -- ++ytti _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
