Cisco as Big Brother (Was Re: Cisco's AIP vs HSSI)

Wed Oct 16 21:25:01 UTC 1996

At 01:29 AM 10/16/96 -0500, Alan Hannan wrote:
>
>  Although, I know lots of smart smart smart people who haven't.
>  One of them is looking for a job, and he's not looking at cisco.
>  (not me...)
>
>  -alan
>
>
>
Alan;

Somebody has to stay out of the cisco orbit to give the others
a chance to figure it out. :-)

Seriously, I started out with Proteon p4200 routers and I was one
of the ones to talk Wellfleet into building a router (me and a hundred
others) when what they wanted to sell were bridges. cisco came in third
for the NEARnet startup.

One of the reasons that cisco has earned its place as Number One is
that, to my knowledge, cisco has never terminally screwed a client.
No other contender can make that claim with me. I've been screwed by
all of them, except cisco. They don't always give me what I want when
I want it, but they don't do fundamentally bad things like walking
away from the ISP market as Proteon did or wiping out their upper
management team as Wellfleet did from time to time.

cisco is no longer easy to work with in many respects, there is so
much management for a large company. But in the early days, cisco was
one of the first companies to turn their customer support inside out
on the Net. You could (still can) talk to anyone in the company about
almost anything. Not as easy as it was, but it can happen.

But you can't get one engineer to hack something into the router
code for you on just his say-so anymore. But once you could. I dunno
maybe you still can, but I think you have to have megabucks behind 
you to do it.

--Kent