The Cisco Marketing team kicked sand in the their own face with a failure to comprehend what customers want, and expecting them to comprehend what a BFR is for. †The claim that “Internet will never be the same again” got a massive cold shoulder when they announced another big router.
- Cisco IOS hints and tricks: CRS-3: The marketing flop of the year -
Itís about time Ciscoís marketing ìwizardsî wake up from their self-induced Web 2.0 stupor and stop ruining Ciscoís hard-won reputation that it got through 25+ years of building, delivering and supporting great products and solutions. Itís also time to realize that the routers stopped being sexy over 15 years ago and that theyíre no more exciting to 99.999% of the population than a paper mill.
Bang on.
- Cisco CRS-3: Is That It? | NetworkWorld.com Community – Title says it all.
- The Reality Behind Cisco’s Router Hype – Forbes.com – Forbes.com:
If there’s one thing that Cisco does that’s guaranteed not to surprise anyone, it’s to release a bigger, faster piece of networking equipment.
Bigger faster, but taking longer and more expensive than competitors.
Juniper upgrades its systems to 250 gigabit Ethernet ports later this year, as it promised to do last month, its systems will be individually capable of 4 terabits of capacity, roughly equal on a per-chassis basis to Cisco’s.
“We get all these claims of leapfrogging, but really at the end of the year these systems will be about equivalent,” says Trebnick.
Cisco marketing people will be choking a bit:
“I think it’s a solid announcement. Does it live up to revolutionizing the Internet and revealing God? I don’t think so,” says Zeus Kerravala, analyst with the Yankee Group. “At the end of the day, what they built was a bigger, faster router. That’s what Cisco does.”
- Cisco’s New Router Could Let Everyone In China Make A Video Call At Once -
That number — three times what Cisco’s current best product, the CRS-1, can handle — is just a theoretical upper limit. But still, it’s a pretty staggering upper limit.
Just how fast is 322 Tbps?
Well, for one thing, it’s fast enough to allow every man, woman, and child in China to make a video call at the same time.
Obviously †got the same briefing material / press release and dutifully barfed it up.
- Just How Fast Is Ciscoís New Router? Really Freaking Fast | Gadget Lab | Wired.com – Wired read the marketing on the CRS-3 and dutifully regurgitated the awful statistics lovingly provided by the marketing team.
- Cisco Unveils High-Capacity CRS-3 Routers ´ Data Center Knowledge – I’d say Rich Miller was busy at something else when he regurgitated this pap. Reads like the press release and he had to write something.
Misdirected Marketing
This is the latest in several marketing missteps by Cisco. Remember the Valentines Day video, or John Chambers acting like an idiot with some journalist thing. (I’m not even going to bother searching for the links they were so execrable). Of failing to manke any hype of the ISR routers, or IOS 15.
I need better technical marketing, and less of Silicon Valley hype wallahs. John, please put the funds back into engineers writing what papers, design guides and documentation.
Stop with the cruddy Web 2.0 marketing. Even journalists are noticing so you must look really stupid.
