Cisco’s new strategy
I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a couple of years now. Cisco (watching it margins shrink, it’s potential market dry up and it’s future fall barren) has decided to fuck it’s customers and directly compete with them.
Their new approach to providing entire data centers (sort of like white labeled data centers) is a brazen attempt at coopting IBM, HP, EMC, Dell and the rest of their large partner base.
Good luck on that.
What’s a shame is that they haven’t been able to develop the expertise or shift horses to what they SHOULD be doing and what I assumed they were doing - once they bought Linksys, Scientific-Atlanta and Five Across.
What they SHOULD be doing is:
- offering a turn key social platform approach
- with an underlying ID layer (similar to what they did for the NYTimes = TimesPeople)
- with secure email (Ironport), in-home devices (LinkSys), social networking (Five Across/Tribe)
- all wrapped together with a video on-line chat help service (Webex)
- and backed by a major brand, deep pockets and the where with all to survive the nuclear winter and emerge competitive to Microsoft and Google.
- you know - like a Citizen Dashboard licensing business. Or think of it as white labeled Citizen Dashboards
This social platform would then partner with broke newspapers and going broke media companies - and possibily Clear Channel and/or Live Nation. And hell - why don’t you throw ina few broke retailers, shopping malls and real estate brokers.
Ever heard of turn-key approach?
What is your ‘network people’ - besides this?
Turn-key data centers?
There’s a Cisco marketing exec who lives in my neighborhood and who is part of our circle of friends. I tried to explain this strategy to him.To no avail.
He’s a typical marketing guy so he started throwing around terms he doesn’t understand like ‘viral’, ’social’ and (burp) ‘open’ and I had to cringe. These are the folks running Cisco - and so with that taken into light - it’s clear why Cisco is cannibalizing it’s own future - rather than inventing a new one.
That’s all it’s capable of doing. Eating it’s own young.
Too bad - cause somebody ELSE is gonna do this strategy - and now that they’re being pushed by Cisco, maybe it’ll be HP or IBM.
Well thing’s for sure - Sun is NOT gonna do it.
