

Cisco’s CEO is stretching his company in all directions. Can it hold together? - martincmartin
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14303574

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tptacek
The Cisco smart grid initiative makes perfect sense to me; it's barely even an
extension to what Cisco already does.

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.

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schemer
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.

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tptacek
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.

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schemer
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.

~~~
MaysonL
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_Systems)
most of which are about single companies acquired by Cisco.

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gamble
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.

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sho
Yes? No? Who cares? Take it to motleyfool.

