Well, getting Enterprises "used to VoIP" is a good thing if you can figure out how to make money at it.  I know that the handsets are quite pricey and it is one of the things that makes people hold onto their phone sets and older PBXes.

I keep thinking that there has to be a better way as people transition to cell phones.  Why not have the cell phone handset be your office phone?  This is the place I could definitely see femtocells.  Build a nice wireless based PBX system and give folks just 1 number.

seven

Craig,

I think the handset is a commodity appliance.  I don't believe that Cisco can compete well in a commodity marketplace.

I do think getting people used to VOIP was / is a good thing.  I just don't think the Cisco phone did that.  I think that what pushed VOIP into common use were plays like Vonage and SKYPE.  I don't think Cisco drove that trend.

i think Cisco would have done just fine making the VOIP gateways and adding that functionality into their routers.  An I would guess that in the gateway and router business they have made some money on VOIP.  Especially the routers both edge and core.  More IP means more routing. (in general)

But the commodity appliance?  While I also don't have access to their financial numbers, I would wager if you did a complete cost accounting including acquisitions, R&D, etc. that they did not make much, if any, money on the phones them selves.

I put the phone play in the same category as the Flip.

And I know lots of IT teams who hate those phones and several who have pulled them out of their networks.

How many people do you know who use the Cisco phone platform actually have the phones read back in audio the email in the subscriber inbox?  (I think smart phones including blackberries killed that application).  And how many times have you seen someone log into their email and get a text transcript of a voice mail?  After all, these were two of the main features that Cisco pumped in the early days of selling the phones.

I never saw anyone use those features.  Remove those, and the phones deliver zero additional function over a traditional pbx based phone system.  And they deliver this "function" at a price point much higher than other phone options.  

So, yeah, I think the phones were a mistake.  Note: I worked in a shop that deployed them.  And saw the huge waste of money they were and how much IT cost went into supporting them.  When that company got bought, the buyer moved the company off the Cisco phone platform as it cost too much to support.

just my MHO overlaid with some real world experiences.

sailboat

OK, I'll admit: I don't have complete proprietarty P&L data on Cisco phones. I was going on the impression I've always had of that part of the business -- and yes, I've seen Cisco phones around (even used one, IIRC) but I haven't taken a cound of how many types of phones I've seen in offices over the years.

So you think the phones were a bad move, eh?  Getting enterprises accustomed to VoIP wasn't a good idea?

In my last company, we eliminated the IT department completely.  The only servers we had were for storing R&D data.  Simple ethernet network.  

email running on gmail servers.

back up was automated.

Our costs were less than 1/10Th our competitions for IT and Telephony services.  

zero IT wars.  

We saw produtivity go up while costs went down.

sailboat

Craig

I read your post that Cisco has done well with the "Cisco Phone".  Really?

Have you seen a breakout of the revenue for that product line?  with the math showing costs, SG&A, and more importantly, the cost of what Cisco invested into the technology to bring it to market?

Also, how many offices around do you actually see Cisco phones working in?  I travel a lot and have lots of meetings in various corporate settings and rarely see them.

I would bet money that Cisco has made very little, if anything, NET, on the phones.

sailboat

Yup.  Only it's  a tug-of-war more than anything else.  IT asserts control over the environment.   User departments can't accomplish what they need to because the systems, devices or applications selected by IT don't do what they need.  User departments bypass IT.  Users get things done.  Then something bad happens.  IT blames user departments for bypassing them.  Finance and purchasing crack down on non-approved systems, devices and applications.  Wash/rinse/repeat.

So the last time this battle hit the airwaves was the whole Ethernet Revolution.  For those of you too young to remember, IT departments wanted everybody to use their PCs to subtend to the mainframe via token ring.  Departments gave IT the middle finger and built their own Ethernets for Printer/File Sharing.

And IT lost.

It will lose this control battle as well.  Smartphones, Tablets and all that jazz have broken down the IT walls.  I think this (like the Ethernet thing) will become a losing war of attrition for IT departments.

Ever been to an IT conference?  They have session titles like "How to keep users from using your network".

seven

Well, they're getting back into five "cores," technically ... two of them being collaboration (which admittedly does fit Cius) and "video" (which can be applied to just about any tech product in the universe right now.)

thinking there were serious about getting back to their core business.

Fool me once, etc....

C_C

You know, it occurs to me that Cisco has Cisco Phones, and they've done well. I haven't heard anybody suggest Cisco ditch the phones.

In a sense, Cius is the next-gen Cisco Phone. So, there's *some* logic there.

The problem is competition. Like Chomsky said, Cisco won't be alone in this niche for very long, and there's more brand-name passion in tablets than in phones. (Among end users, at least. IT people might love Cisco phones, I don't know.)