
Cisco's Feud with Former Star Executive Turns Personal and Costly - kjw
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/08/17/ciscos-feud-with-former-star-executive-turns-2.html
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ChuckMcM
It is often interesting at the C level how things work. Ambitious people work
their way up until they get to "the point" where they are either going in or
going on. I got to watch this at Sun with Ed Zander as he made his way toward
the CEO spot at Sun. When Scott "chose a different way" (which is what people
seem to say when they mean "You are not getting the executive position you
seek.") Ed left Sun and went off to become the CEO of Motorola. Marissa Meyer
trying to become more senior at Google until it was clear she never would, and
then on to Yahoo!.

Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't.

~~~
jedberg
It's a matter of math. The average public company CEO has 7-10 C level
reports. When that CEO leaves, they can't all get promoted.

I mean it happens at all levels, it's just more news at the C level. If you
want to be the VP of sales for example, and you're currently a regional
director, there are probably a few other regional directors who want to
replace your VP. Not everyone can do it.

~~~
yuhong
I have been thinking of "Yishan-style CEOs" for a while now, and part of point
is to deal with things like this better (including board of directors doing
CEO searches publicly). Anil Dash once had a joke about it:
[https://twitter.com/anildash/status/893153626247626752](https://twitter.com/anildash/status/893153626247626752)

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babesh
Cisco has been circling the drain for a long, long time (far longer than
Arista). They are close in mold to IBM with declining revenue offset by
managed profits from periodic layoffs and outsourcing. Cisco would continually
find ways to cut employee perks.

They thought their thing was software consulting but they couldn't/wouldn't
compete for talent with the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Note that
Google really hit its stride in the early 2000s. That is a good 13 years ago.

People at Cisco knew even then. People would game the system by starting
companies to be bought by Cisco and then quiting and repeating the process. A
long time employee I knew set his price target at $30 and I think sold at
least a large chunk when it temporarily hit that. My impression was that there
were many slackers at the company.

A company mostly concerned with internal politics... much like IBM...
presentations with org charts reminding me of my co-op time at IBM where
people talked mostly about whom was the boss of whom... especially important
since for Cisco, layoffs sometimes seemed to hit whole groups.

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exelius
Cisco is circling the drain because their biggest customers finally realized
they can build better products than Cisco using open source tools and
commodity hardware. The big telecoms are all dramatically reducing spend and
moving to proprietary in-house platforms.

Companies like Arista are selling white-box network gear at low margins
because they know the market is commoditizing. Cisco got addicted to fat
margins, but they have almost no patent advantage in most of their biggest
markets. It gets hard to justify those margins after a while.

~~~
tptacek
I'd love it if someone could expand on this a bit. My infrastructure knowledge
sort of dies around 2005-2006, when I left Arbor Networks, at a job where we
had to know the details of the various TCAMs in different line cards for Cisco
Cat6k switches. From '05-'06 I did a fair bit of experimenting with network
processors (oddball embedded CPUs with fast packet processing mechanisms).
Then I got sucked up into application security.

The thing is, I've spent a career writing C code to parse, break up, and route
packets for every conceivable protocol, in userland and several different
kernels.

What I can't tell is: is my skillset here totally outmoded because of the new
network infrastructure model, or are we in a new golden age for it?

(I am fine with either answer! I just want to know.)

~~~
yusyusyus
A big shining place is in DDoS mitigation. We demo'ed some in-house built
replacements for $VENDOR and found it to be cost-effective to do some more
easily implemented parts in-house.

Based on some of my discussions with folks, I think people overestimate the
cost-effectiveness of not doing some HW offload/out of kernel packet path
stuff in specialized situations. Anyway, Amazon is looking for folks to work
on their in-house DDoS mitigation pipeline per the reqs that float my way.

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1024core
But isn't this the Valley Way? Where did Cisco's founders come from? Where did
Juniper's founders come from?

This is why the Silicon Valley thrives: people leave ossified old companies
and start new ones where they can bring their ideas to fruition more quickly.

~~~
hkmurakami
Cisco's founders came from Stanford.

>Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 by Leonard Bosack, who was in
charge of the Stanford University computer science department's computers, and
his wife Sandy Lerner, who managed the Graduate School of Business' computers.
(wikipedia)

(from what I understand, Sandy was the driving force behind Cisco throughout)

~~~
cybernytrix
Until Sequoia's Don Valentine gets the VPs to rebel and have Sandy fired. Who
ended up selling all his founder stocks for pennies, while the rest became
billionaires...

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whipoodle
It's strange to me that someone can be a good enough businessperson to get all
the way to the executive level of a huge company, and still feel emotionally
hurt that someone left to work at a competitor. That strikes me as a rather
childish reaction to business as usual.

~~~
spike021
Even adults demonstrate jealousy.

I'd say that's a human flaw, rather than a flaw of age.

~~~
whipoodle
I'll agree that people evince childishness regardless of age.

~~~
spike021
But I didn't say that "people evince childishness regardless of age".

I specifically said _jealousy_ is a trait attributed to humans as a flaw.

That has nothing to do with it being childishness or not. Otherwise it would
be a trait somehow eliminated after childhood for a majority of adults, which
it isn't since all of us (adults) experience it.

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losingthefight
So, I totally read that title as "Cisco's feud with Former Star Trek Executive
Turns Personal and Costly", thinking they misspelled Sisko from Deep Space 9.
Been a long day...

~~~
semperdark
I want to read that version of the article!

~~~
kylec
Or better yet, watch the episode!

[http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/For_the_Uniform_(episode)](http://memory-
alpha.wikia.com/wiki/For_the_Uniform_\(episode\))

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macspoofing
>Mr. Chambers felt betrayed by Ms. Ullal, a former Cisco executive said. "To
John, it was a relationship question -- 'Why would you do such a thing?' "

WTF. This guy is insane. If you're in switches, you're going after Cisco.
There is no other way to build a company in that market.

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jstandard
I can't help but wonder if this is a well-disguised PR piece from Arista.
While the feud itself seems likely, the whole article, down to the details, is
heavily reliant on David vs. Goliath themes to paint Arista and Ms. Ullal in a
positive light.

Given Arista's strategy of directly attacking Cisco's market share and
"keeping quiet about it" you can bet they had similar sentiments about Cisco.
Those details are missing.

~~~
osbjmg
Rachel King's job involves covering cisco.

[https://www.wsj.com/news/author/8500](https://www.wsj.com/news/author/8500)

I don't think it would be ethical of her to accept direction from a company
involved with them on what the subject of her piece should be.

~~~
jstandard
Agreed, I hope that isn't the case here. Thanks for pointing out Cisco is part
of her beat.

In the past several years I've become increasingly skeptical of news,
particularly personal stories where the evidence seems slanted in a certain
direction. There's usually another untold side to the story that remains
untold as soon as the general narrative is established.

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hkmurakami
If you're interested in this, look into the feud between David Cheriton and
Andy Bechtolshiem regarding Arista.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/06/05/on-the-
verge...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/06/05/on-the-verge-of-ipo-
arista-networks-faces-lawusit-from-a-billionaire-cofounder/#795fe2905d95)

Valley feuds at its finest hour.

~~~
myrandomcomment
The key is neither took it personally and they still work together.

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mpnagle
This feels very Hooli vs Pied Piper to me...

~~~
navbaker
I've never seen a picture of the Cisco CEO, so every time he was mentioned in
the article I kept picturing a very put-out Gavin Belson.

