Will it take off or just become another failure like the DX80? Great product but the fact you need Spark to run it makes me question if it'll take off.
20 replies (most recent on top)
Everything at Cisco is hugely expensive. Have you ever tried purchasing a stick of RAM for a UCS server? Completely standard Ram but with a Cisco sticker on it? You will pay at LEAST 10x the price than you would from somebody like Crucial. A hard disk for the same UCS server? This time Cisco don't even put a new sticker over the Toshiba sticker! As as example, over $400 for a 3.5" 300GB SAS drive. It's absolutely bonkers! If your are ordering internally, (Cisco purchasing Cisco hardware) you get 75% discount. This is the case purchasing UCS gear anyway as I have purchased tonnes of it. Even with the discount, the servers are still overpriced compared to other vendors! Salesmen are given license to give customers "big discounts" to keep them sweet but the reality is the hardware is so overpriced to begin with that the discounts are meaningless. I think customers are catching on that Cisco sticker is no longer worth the premium and they would be right.
It's a novelty product. Has no real purpose for customers.
everthing spark is way too expensive.
the small spark board is 5000$ plus a monthly 199$ fee, how many customers are going to pay that much?
@LJx9gWV-1wso AMEN - DX-80 is terrible at everything, including as a second monitor. I've had two PC's now that refuse to drive it correctly as a monitor. I suppose the fact that they gave lowly little me one should tell you that they have warehouses full of stock and are trying to offload them.
2urf - Everyone in Cisco engineering working on CIUS knew it was a total piece of crap. Poor battery life. High power consumption. Very bad thermal behavior. Cisco's internal cost of goods for the device was higher than the street price for the well designed and nicely performing IPAD.
Most of CIUS was engineered by incompetent, external consulting companies with close ties to the Nortel Mafia then leading what is now the Cisco Collaboration BU. It was a complete and total failure. Cisco engineers from other areas were parachuted in to try and save the consultants' mess, but it was unsalvagable.
This product was engineered so poorly that the executive staff forced a small group of internal engineers to sign an internal NDA (couldn't divulge their activities to their co-workers on the project) and to work with Motorola to customize Motorola's tablet for a CIUS replacement. This market recovery effort also failed.
CIUS was complete and total crap, but the external engineering consulting companies with personal ties to Cisco's executive staff profited nicely from the effort. Cisco, its employees, customers, and shareholders were totally screwed on this.
I believe the DX80 was something like $12000 and that was a complete flop.
Holy crap. I thought Apple's Thunderbolt display was way over priced at $1000. Why would anyone pay $12000 for a DX80? I used to see them sitting in boxes along the hallways in RTP. Most managers had one & sometimes entire teams had them, but no one really used them for much more than an extra monitor.
Actually Cius and UME were before RT started. IX5000, DX80, and Spark were on his watch. Actually some of those products are very nice, but at the end of the day are not selling. Old school phones and licenses pay the bills.
Was the sparkboard thought up by or sponsored by the same people that did the ume? That consumer grade home video conferencing solution that required a monthly fee?
It's just a gimmick and a pretty poor one at that. There was great fanfare that a Sparkboard could be yours for a "measley $4000 plus monthly licence fee" - which by Cisco price comparisons might seem like a relative bargain. I believe the DX80 was something like $12000 and that was a complete flop.
Rowan needs to stop flogging the dead horse here. Spark is a failure and no amount of shiny gimmicks can rescue it. Time to call it doc, Time Of Death....
Nobody wants a smartboard. They go into any random location with a dry-erase board, use it, if they want to save the drawing, they take a photo with their phone and email/share it out. Done. Simple. I'm guessing that someone came up with this idea b/c they looked at one of those ancient whiteboards that you could hit a button and print it on drafting paper and thought "I wish I could share this on LinkedIn!"
Smart boards are nothing new and none have been successful. They're an expensive, fixed asset that doesn't fit today's mobile collaborative environment. Cisco will sell a few units to executives who want the latest shiny new toy. After that, sales will drop off a cliff.
Agreed on the Rowan point. He appears to be tone deaf.
Just because it sounds cool when you explain it at a Silicon Valley wine and cheese party attended by venture capitalist, doesn't mean it is going to sell. I find it alarming nobody in the ELT is operating as a fail safe for these crazy ideas. They are either asleep at the wheel or they are disconnected and don't understand what the market wants or needs.
Steve Jobs was able to drive an industry changing product idea with little outside input and a tenacious focus on that vision. There was ONE Steve Jobs. Rowan is not Steve Jobs. Let's stop it already.
I've tried to use Sparkboard a few times now, and at first I gave it the benefit of the doubt because it was new and buggy but now it's supposed to be stable and good enough for customers. It's pretty terrible. It has failed a few times when Rowan has tried to demo it to huge audiences - most notably at Cisco Live in Las Vegas. It was cringe worthy and I had to watch it through my fingers! I thought it couldn't be THAT bad so tried it for myself. I was wrong.
The question I always ask is what business issue does it solve? If it's because the white board pens get dry, then thats not going to cut it. Being pretty and cool to use, isn't a reason for a business to invest. Business does not buy in the same reasons consumers do and I think this is something R.T doesn't seem to understand. Come on Cisco these are the basics!
DX80 the most useless paperweight I ever came across! S---s even as secondary screen.
Already cheaper options in this space: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3166572/collaboration/cisco-faces-a-tougher-collaboration-rival-in-updated-prysm.html
Sparkboard = Cius = DOA
4yr dev and launching without apis is a fail in my book.
Are these things installed anywhere except the EBC building? You'd think with WPRs push to put video conferencing in every room, they'd also put these things in. But my guess is that your department would be charged $5000/mo to have one.
I struggle to see the utility of the Sparkboard, really, but maybe that's because I'm not especially impressed with the latest-and-greatest gadgets that are designed to make things OH SO GREAT in the business world in general and business meetings in particular. Spark itself is looking for an identity, and, at least in its current form, it's neither intuitive nor especially useful. I've always thought that it is being designed to replace WebEx because, you know, nobody ever uses WebEx...
You've clearly never used Sparkboard OP, because if you had, you would already know the answer to the question. It's absolute muck.