Cisco disconnects Linksys brand

Cisco will ditch the Linksys brand to bring all SMB and consumer gear under its single networking omnicorp banner. CEO John Chambers blabbed the plan to journalists at a European roundtable last week. Chambers opined: "The reason we kept Linksys' brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the …

[Stuart Tomlinson]

oh dear

That just devalued the Brand then.

[Sam]

Bad Move

Linksys were always known as "the Kak end of Cisco"..This move will stop them being able to distance themselves.

Keep your eyes on the share price...

[calagan]

Bad move

It is as bad as GM renaming the Daewoo to Chevrolet. Corvette then had to split and become a stand-alone brand, unable to share the same name with cheap-ass korean toy-cars.

[Rob]

But its a well known brand....

If you asked some PC World shoppers at random I think some of them would have heard of Linksys but not much chance any of them would have heard of Cisco other than "thong tha thong thong thong"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's going to devalue the CCNA!

Looks like my CCNA will be devalued by association to that cheap Linksys junk.

[Andy S]

i always thought

that Linksys was the consumer brand of Cisco. That all the corporate kit was sold as Cisco and all the home kit as Linksys.

[Dillon Pyron]

Support?

I wonder how long they'll support older Linksys products? I recently downloaded a firmware upgrade for my 6 year old Linksys firewall/router. Will they still publish these, or only for the latest and greatest? I haven't been terribly impressed with D-Link, so that's the only way to go. Of course, I do have an older box and two 100 BaseT NICs and a nice 8 port managed router. I guess I do have an open source option.

[Daniel Ballado-Torres]

Ow.

I hope by "rebranding" they mean "we'll sell SMB stuff, but now it will be Cisco-quality stuff for SMBs".

Because if not, they will taint their brand on the consumer market side! Same thing happened with HP in the laptop/desktop market over here, so when I mention a "robust HP 9000 server", a crap machine is what pops into the minds of most people I tell this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Other way around?

Maybe you've got it backwards... at least when it comes to wireless connectivity, I'd gladly trade all the s#itty Cisco cards that are a pain to setup, connect when they feel like it, and randomly fail for Linksys cards that work the first time, and connect in seconds.

[Anonymous Coward]

CCNA are already pretty devalued

Probably one of the biggest wastes of my time ever, found the difference between ccna 2 and 3 and 4 was so negligible as to be insulting due to the amount of repetition, e.g. perform the EXACT same sequence of commands you did to configure a router to configure access on a switch.

CCNA 1 is usefull for general TCP/IP theory as are parts of CCNA 3 for VLSM, but the rest of the course content is rubbish follow instructions learn the cisco way brainwashing exercises

Never mind the fact you are screwed if you ever have to touch anything non cisco, juniper gear or linux routers anyone???

[Simon]

Rebranding...

I suspect that the result of all this (at least in the short term) will be the same Linksys products will continue to remain on the market, but now they'll have a Cisco logo only (as opposed to the dual branding that they now have). I expect that support will also continue for Linksys products - this seems to me to be an exercise in marketing efficiency, rather than promoting two separate brands and the marketing dollars required for both, they just have to promote one brand to reach customers across all sectors.

[Rebecca Putman]

I quit...

...using Linksys when Cisco bought them, because I just don't like Cisco. (No real reason; I just don't.) I've since moved to Netgear, and have been much happier with them.

Too bad for Cisco, as ditching Linksys simply means they're ditching customers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linksys offer support?

When did this happen? I bought a Linksys WAG54Gv2 ADSL Router thinking "Linksys is a Cisco company, should be some decent kit.". I could not have been more wrong if I had just changed my surname to Wrong and moved to 11 Wrong Street, Wrongtown.

Most, if not all, of the 'features' like Dyndns updating, port forwarding, SNTP time syncing, logging and even the 802.11g just did not work properly, if at all. Several 'Live Help' sessions with clueless idiots in the Phillipines who have to 'just check with my supervisor' whenever you ask them a question more technical than 'How do I turn it on?' and a number of still broken firmware releases later over the course of 6 to 12 months and the unit was a barely passable ADSL router with flaky wireless.

The only reason it became vaguely useful was that they eventually released the GPL'd firmware and some happy hacker in Australia 'fixed' it, so at least some of the features worked.

Then 3 months later, the 4 port switch decided to have an epileptic fit (have you ever seen WinXP doing the 'A network cable is unplugged'/'Local area connection is now connected' dance?) before it finally died completely. At which point the unit decided it no longer wanted to train on the ADSL line either. So all I have is little blue box with flaky wireless... that's useful!

Linksys/Cisco can rebrand to Monday: for all I care... they're never seeing another cent from me.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're welcome to rebrand to Monday

...but they probably don't want to associate with Pricewaterhouse either.

[Christopher Slater-Walker]

As long as you get the same support across the board

I guess you can probably find as many Netgear/DLink etc. horror stories as you can Linksys ones. In my own personal experience over a number of years of using Cisco kit of all shapes and sizes, I can say that whenever there has been a problem, it has been rectified efficiently, either by hardware replacement or through the TAC (Technical Assistance Centre). But then I have always been a "corporate" customer, albeit not always a big one.

If the entire range of soon-to-be Cisco kit can benefit from this same level of support for registered products, then all customers may find this a valuable change. However, as always, time will tell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good.

<rant>

I never liked the Linksys name. It always had a cheap sound to it (well it is). Mine would always break or I would have tech support (outsourced..India voice?) tell me that a function in the manual which I have used on a prior router tell me that option doesn't work! They should also get rid of the plastic housing for their SOHO products to which I am referring to. Who runs a WiFi router in a plastic housing?? Have they ever heard of EMI/RFI (Electromagnetic Interference/Radio Frequency Interference)??? One could only assume it isn't a significant factor for them when selling to the SOHO/Home crowd.

</rant>

[michael]

Ditching Customers? Wheres the evidence?

Rebecca, you've followed up your endering little anecdote about your irrational dislike for cisco prompting you to abandon linksys as soon as they were bought out with an unsupported statement that they are ditching customers.

Is it your intention to claim that there are other people who would have abandoned linksys on principle, but unlike you, they weren't aware that the company had been taken over? Or are you suggesting that there are waves of die hard Linksys fans who will be jumping ship because the Cisco name doesn't have the same appeal to them?