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.)
Flip cameras, tablets--what the heck is Cisco up to? Yup, Cisco might have some kind of a first mover advantage in the enterprise market, but for how long?
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.)
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.)