
Resignations at Cisco hint at internal power struggle - petethomas
http://www.recode.net/2016/6/6/11871550/cisco-mpls-team-resigns
======
vanessa98
A legendary racket from days past! Leave Cisco with technology and engineers,
get generously funded by Cisco, get generously bought out by Cisco, inside
Cisco enjoy sandbagged targets and guaranteed payouts, lather, rinse, repeat.
Self-dealing masterpieces!

~~~
azernik
My impression from people who have been involved is that it's not just a self-
enriching racket; mainline Cisco is actually really bad at building new
products that aren't just minor variations on old ones. Sometimes they
innovate through acquisitions, but if there's no external company to acquire
sometimes you have to make your own to get your good engineers out of that
environment of "sandbagged targets and guaranteed payouts" for a few years.

~~~
ashwinaj
This.

(At the risk of getting down voted) Cisco is a sales driven company not an
engineering company. Barring a few business units (and that too I'm being
generous) there is absolutely no innovation or drive to build new products.
It's a terrible place to work if you are an engineer with aspirations to
tackle engineering challenges.

~~~
signa11
> Cisco is a sales driven company not an engineering company. > Barring a few
> business units (and that too I'm being generous) > there is absolutely no
> innovation or drive > to build new products.

this is _exactly_ right. for example, nick-feamster (formerly gatech, and now
at princeton) hosted a google hangout with nick-mckeown (stanford) as part of
his sdn mooc on coursera. the hangout video is approx. an hour long, and is
available here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abXezfJsqso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abXezfJsqso)

initial 15-20 minutes of this video describes the experience of these n/w
researchers (mckeown, cassado etc) when they presented their (sdn) idea to
execs at csco, their (exec's) rejection of the said idea, which indicating to
them (the researchers) that it (the idea) passed the so called 'idea-smell-
test' :)

if you have time to spare, watch it !

~~~
zump
What is wrong with your punctuation?

~~~
bgilroy26
Some people speak with a lot of parentheticals.

We don't need speech to be a monoculture for people to understand one another.

~~~
bllguo
I don't see how disliking that poster's writing style translates into advocacy
for a speech "monoculture."

~~~
bgilroy26
I read the comment above as disapproving of the all of the parentheses in the
gp post.

If you remove the posts from people who write that way from the total we are
closer to a monoculture.

The difference between having one fewer way of writing and literally having
one way of writing is the size of the rhetorical exaggeration in my comment

------
iaw
As problematic as Cisco's messaging was on this fiasco, Tony Fadell should
take note about how professionals handle disagreements in the press.

~~~
outside1234
I'm sure Tony Fadell still thinks he did an amazing job at Nest.

~~~
argonaut
By all objective measures he did a phenomenal job at Nest. He started and sold
it for $3.2B. The fact that he failed to continue to be successful post-
acquisition, is hardly a "poor" overall record.

~~~
outside1234
I would describe his exit as the only real thing he was successful at. The
product is not selling, his employees are all quitting, the acquirer is
pissed, the acquisitions he made are all pissed, product development is
stalled, Google had to go to plan B with Google Home, ...

~~~
argonaut
Yes, and all of that just shows he isn't perfect. But Tony Fadell will have
_no problem_ raising hundreds of millions for his next venture, joining a VC
firm, or joining another company as a C-level executive.

------
ccvannorman
It is my understanding that Cisco was founded on router technology developed
Stanford which was then patented and exploited by the company (despite
Stanford's intention that it be public domain)[1]. I wonder if the cultural
tone that that set is what, decades later, has landed them in this situation.

[1]
[http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html](http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html)

~~~
kijiki
The NOS was based on software written at Stanford. The HW was Andy
Bechtolsheim 68K board, which also (without the theft) become the SUN-1.

cisco paid Stanford off later, although the author of that NOS is still
unhappy.

------
mkane848
While things like Jabber have an obvious alternative (i.e. Slack), who can
compete with Cisco in terms of their desk phones and meeting room equipment? I
only ask because their hardware is so ingrained in the company I work for that
even if I were somehow able to convince everyone that Slack was worth
switching for, who the hell else am I gonna get video conferencing equipment
like this[0] from?

[0][http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaborati...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaboration-
endpoints/telepresence-mx-series/datasheet-c78-731263.html)

~~~
tssva
Polycom and Huawei are the two next largest providers of telepresence
equipment and there are a host of smaller competitors.

As far as phones Avaya is the big competitor in the enterprise space.
Microsoft Skype for Business/Lync is also deployed many places for voice using
phones from a variety of suppliers including Polycom and HP. Lately a lot of
enterprises have started to move away from desk phones to using soft phones.

~~~
mkane848
Cool, I'll have to look into both! Huawei feels like an "Oh, right, of course"
answer but Polycom doesn't ring any bells.

Interesting observation on the soft phones trend, though. In my work
environment our Cisco phones might as well be softphones since everything's
rigged through Jabber. Give us a webcam instead of the desk phone and I don't
see any loss of functionality.

------
thrwaway_711
MPLS' impact at Cisco is similar to that of Jeff Dean and others at Google.
They were responsible for creating Cisco's most successful products, so it's
sad to see them leave. But the power struggle is definitely undeniable, as a
lot of senior figures have departed Cisco.

~~~
zump
You mean like the Catalyst 2600?

~~~
packetized
I feel fairly confident you're not referring to the 10/100 Token Ring switch,
so... could you clarify?

~~~
quesera
I don't think there was ever a 2600 model in the Catalyst family. But the
Cisco 2600 series were incredibly common routers.

~~~
tssva
Maybe he meant the Catalyst 2900 which was really a 2 slot version of the 5000
with the sup card and a 12 or 24 port line card already screwed in. I did a
large deployment of Lightstreams (It think 1010s), Cat 5000s and Cat 2900s.
This was prior to official availability of the Cat 5000 and 2900. They were
running beta code and we had to upgrade them every couple of days. We hit a
stable enough build about a week before going live to coincide with the
official availability of the 5000s. Our customer got a big break on the
equipment but had to be live by general availability of the catalysts to be a
demonstration customer. The chain smoking tool of an engineer Cisco sent, he
like to brag his employee number was in the teens, instilled a distrust of
Cisco support engineers that future Cisco engineers have reinforced, the good
ones have been few and far between. That system made it live despite his best
efforts.

Anyways I digress. The Cat 2900 and Cat 5000 came from the Crescendo
acquisition as did Mario Mazzola and Prem Jain.

------
mdip
I'm a bit biased here since I work doing development mostly aimed at a
competitor of Cisco in the Unified Communications space, but after seeing a
few presentations by Rowan Trollope at Enterprise Connect, I have the feeling
all is not well at Cisco and this article seems to echo that.

At EC, I really felt like they were on the defense trying to market a product
that's trying to be "cool like Slack" while chiding enterprise customers for
being uncool and wanting things like control over upgrade roll-outs and being
interested in "fake clouds"[1]. Their presentation of this new product had the
feeling of an angry old man trying to sell mood rings to hipsters.

The attitude of the presenters bordered on insulting and I was reminded of a
meeting with Cisco guys with a very similar attitude, almost decade ago, when
my previous employer was trying to re-instate maintenance on our Cisco phone
infrastructure. At the time, we were looking to either get maintenance or
replace it with something else (Office Communications Server 2008 -- which
hadn't been released yet, but which Microsoft was actively courting us to
become a tester of with very good financial terms associated). The rep
sarcastically said "What are you going to do, switch to Asterisk or LCS?"[2].

My recollection of parts of this is hazy, but IIRC, they weren't willing to
budge on price and even found places that we had miscalculated the cost we
already couldn't pay, resulting in a _higher_ cost. In 15 years of dealing
with vendor reps, I've never had a call that even came close to that one. I
fielded two different calls within an hour of that meeting's end with _both_
people saying the Cisco guys were "arrogant DICKS".

Within two years my previous employer ripped out all of our Cisco IP-PBX
related devices, moved to OCS 2007 and the company has stayed with the
Microsoft Solution of Various Names since. If the vendor reps were any
indication, Cisco didn't believe there would ever _be_ competition for their
product, and had a _very_ dim view of Microsoft (still seem to, today). Their
new product (who's name escapes me) seems to be the direction they want to go,
but they're late, and aren't as good as the competition.

[1] This was a phrase the Cisco folks seemed really attached to and I kept
thinking that the one feature you want in a collaboration/"phone" system is
stability. And the "fake clouds" were things like on-prem/cloud deployment
options available from Microsoft and policies that embraced limited backward
compatibility and controlled update roll-out. For me, the phrase became "fake
clouds don't rain" (or at least when they do, you have some control over it).

[2] This is paraphrased, but not much. Microsoft had courted us at the time
and we were involved in pre-release for OCS. We didn't actually migrate to
LCS, we migrated to OCS while participating in the OCS R2 TAP. They provided
us with people on-site that basically designed and helped us roll the solution
out at no charge (they were supposed to be resources for the TAP program but
they assisted with everything).

~~~
cturner
"If the vendor reps were any indication, Cisco didn't believe there would ever
be competition for their product"

Familiar feeling. The explanation: there is no long-term horizon. All they
care about is near-term bonus, and things that position them personally.

Companies with clearly-defined leading products are under permanent risk of
being hijacked by sociopaths.

Engineers are intelligent, but we are focused on hard problems, and we are
typically invested in the platform which limits our ability to manoeuvre.

The sociopaths have nothing better to do than spend all their day
consolidating position, and they don't care if they have to destroy the
mountain in order to take it. (Once a company has been pillaged, they can just
go somewhere else and do it again.)

As an engineer, you will fight to kill this thing. But once you see it has
succeeded in taking root, immediately try to get clear of it. I don't think
this gets enough emphasis in our circles - we need a short phrase that
captures the transition point. I've just read your blog and suggest "bed
bugs".

~~~
mdip
Agreed. I think the other part of it is organizational blindness, as well.
They reacted to OCS in the same manner that Microsoft reacted to the iPhone.
They were the established player with a mature platform and here came along a
service that did things radically different and lacked, what they perceived,
as the major features that customers in that space were looking for so they
simply laughed at the product. Companies certainly didn't flock to it like
people flocked to the iPhone (a trick I think only Apple can pull off), but by
comparison, Cisco's offering provided a far less integrated experience at a
greater cost and once those back-end features got worked out (or were no
longer relevant), they had a surprise competitor with (at the time[1]) a much
lower price. Couple that with the fact that people are far more comfortable
with making video/voice calls from a PC due to Skype (consumer) and the idea
of getting rid of your desk phone[2] and taking it with you on your laptop for
all of your "business phone needs" isn't so radical anymore.

[1] At the time, there wasn't even a comparison. It took far fewer servers,
cheap (by comparison) licensing that gave you dial-in conferencing for the
cost of the server and the call's cost (no additional per-minute surcharge for
the privilege of using a bridge). I haven't priced a Cisco equivalent in a
while so that may all be different, today.

[2] You can still have a phone with Skype for Business (and they're great
phones from what I've seen) and many companies still pop those phones on
desks. I worked at Global Crossing when we switched, though, and we required a
departmental waiver to get a physical phone (to save money). People did get
decent, certified, headsets, but we made the switch the way people take band-
aids off and there was a _lot_ of bleeding in the first couple of months. It
died down once people got used to it and within a half-year, meeting rooms
went empty in favor of calls with desktop sharing (one can multitask and no
need to walk down the hall carrying your laptop). Laziness always wins. :o)

------
0FCEE9602718
It had become known that Mario, Prem, and Luca were moving on, but the
expectation was that Soni was sticking around and gaining more responsibility.
Guess not. Unfortunate for Cisco.

------
twblalock
I think Cisco is going to end up like HP.

~~~
bogomipz
Aren't they already HP?

~~~
twblalock
Not yet. They still have good revenue and a large share of the market, and new
engineering grads still want to work there.

------
irq
For those unfamiliar, the name MPLS here is also a play on
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching)

