Film at 11:00

Fri Jan 3 17:34:08 UTC 1997

On Fri, 3 Jan 1997 alex at relcom.EU.net wrote:

|} Yes, no doubt. But I'd like to see router's vendors predicted future
|} better than in the past. We all know few serious mistakes CISCO did -
|} with the memory size in CS4500, with CS7000 and CS7010 routers;  and I
|} am afraid to fail into new trap in future... 

Alex - I'm sure there were the visionaries at Cisco with their heads in
the clouds who were telling the various marketing and engineering bodies
to build a box like the 7500 or BFR some time ago.  However, proving the
market would be there and that there would actually be a customer base for
such a product is a little more difficult.

I believe, that only in the past 1-2yrs has ISP revenue actually accounted
for a good portion of Cisco's overall revenue.  (Perhaps someone from
Cisco or someone with their financial statement can speak to this)
Building boxes that require a huge amount of R&D and won't sell more than
< 5,000 of isn't a very profitable business.  Cisco should be thankful
that the overall majority of their ISP user base is rather understanding
when it comes to performance limitations, discovering and working around
software issues, etc. etc. 

-jh-