Cisco Flips consumer unit out with trash Selling digital gadgets to consumers and breaking into the server racket, all the while alienating some of the server-makers who were pushing Cisco Systems networking gear, has been tough on Cisco's profits in recent quarters. And the restructuring that the networking giant has announced is an admission that things are not going …
With the proliferation of high-res mobile devices, the marriage of the flip functions and allure are over. Case in point, I had a flip and it had a great run - until I got my DroidX with already has an 8MB camera and 720p video.
Why carry my flip around? And frankly, why would a giant networking company get in bed with video camera's? It was a dumb move from the start.
Years ago, the big players realised they couldn't stay in their niches and carry on creaming off the same profits. IBM's biggest diversification was into services, and very successful it was too. Hp went into many pies - cameras, printers, storage, networking - and made it work. EMC realised being the biggest player in storage wasn't a longterm survival strategy when so many other players were getting into the act. Even Oracle realised they needed an option with other software makers starting to encroach on their database heartland. Ironicly, TPM's example of Sun is the best example of a big player's failure to diversify in time, followed closely by CISCO. CISCO realised their networking gravytrain was under threat and have tried to diversify into other areas. UCS is struggling and their other endeavours are dropping like flies. Unlike Sun, CISCO has the cash to diversify, but - like Sun - it just doesn't seem to have a coherent plan.
"We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy,"
This is the kind of verbal rubbish-speak that companies need to stop.
But it seems CEO's amd senior managers sprout this garbage and applaud each other for it.
"We failed and are trying to work out what to do next" would be a good alternative
when you cut away the BS, it comes out more like "we're going back to our core network business" rather than "we don't know what to do next".
"We are making key, targeted moves" = "We are"
"as we align operations in support" = "axing some business divisions"
"of our network-centric platform strategy" = "that aren't core-network related".
The issue is not what they are doing (killing a brand that is not a strategic fit), the issue is they were stupid enough to buy it in the first place, which resulted in a half billion dollars being written off.
Anyone with an Smartphone could have told them that since they already had a high-res video camera in their pockets, why would they buy a separate pocket one?
This looks like some idiot CEO bought a shiny new Flip toy then thought like Victor Kiam - 'I liked it so much I bought the company'
FAIL.
I had a chance to play with one of the UCS systems about three months ago. Don't get me wrong, it's very shiny kit. Unfortunately, it just didn't make sense for my company from a price/performance ratio, and the provisioning UI was very confusing on top of it. It also didn't help that we would have had to buy the fibre-channel SAN fabric regardless of going with the UCS kit or not.
For the price we were quoted for the minimum UCS package and six blades, we were able to build out an 8 node cluster using commodity server hardware, with the fibre-channel and storage portions of the package remaining identical, with a bit of money left over.
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