I'm a manager on the webex engineering side. There was a meeting today to discuss how to properly compete with Zoom. This hasn't been the first competitive meeting. Just know Webex is going to be hit next month. Goal is to become more agile.
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Don’t bother. Cisco k–led WebEx years ago. Zoom wouldn’t exist if WebEx wasn’t such a total and complete failure. Nobody is going back to that POS. Zoom is fast &reliable. Something WebEx can only dream about if they knew. Unfortunately this is an area they know nothing about.
the simple fact is Cisco completely f*cked the Webex acquisition by having them report to traditional, hardware-based on-premise Unified Communications. Between the old UC stalwarts and the Tandberg guys that followed, Webex was artificially forced to not be too innovative to prevent cannibalizing the "premium" hardware-based solutions (UCS platform mandatory).
Cisco has made that mistake very often over the last 15 years when it comes to acquisitions. Just acquire to stall market threats, but ultimately you can't stop the inevitable.
The leadership team are beancounters, not visionaries.
Webex has no new ideas to offer
if they did it would have been in market by now
ditch Webex Teams. another annoying tool that is not well thought out that webex tried to integrate.
MS Teams is dog sh–
Zoom is a down-market threat. It is the current 'shiny object' (Remember SLACK?). Meanwhile MS Teams has evolved from an also-ran into the leading enterprise product. Teams is who will smoke WebEx up-market and in the Enterprise. MS has really upped their game.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead-of-ipo-engineers-in-china.html
One key driver for Zoom’s profitability is its large engineering team in China, where average tech salary is relatively lower than in the U.S.
“Our product development team is largely based in China, where personnel costs are less expensive than in many other jurisdictions,” Zoom wrote in a regulatory filing.
WebEx doesn't have the talent to adapt. Any talented employees in WebEx left for Zoom years ago.
Here's an idea on how to compete with Zoom. Don't focus on what the competition is doing and focus on delivering the best quality product and service that is also Fedramp approved. Cisco has a prime opportunity to corner the collaboration market yet it's sitting on its a– watching the world pass it by. Give a huge discount to schools and universities to use and adopt Webex and Webex Teams. Don't let zoom steal that pie.
Agile at Cisco is a joke. It's a BIG excuse to be late and/or delivered with bad quality.
zoom doom is a webex inevitability. fragile won’t save you
Agile is not a failed methodology. The problem is that most companies think it will solve all their problems and that they should shift to it, but don't realize that traditional development / project mgmt is still good and works. So does a hybrid approach (mix in pieces of traditional waterfall and Agile.....it can be easily done). I've been screaming this to anyone who would listen for the past 8 years.
Is agile even possible in the software space? Because every time someone wants a small change, it's a total rebuild. It's te most inefficient and expensive way of running things
From technical standpoint, that would require mass age discrimination to remove the “tech leads” that’ve been here 20+ years and don’t write code but spend time in meetings planning how to get isolated developers to make architecture indecipherable to secure their positions as the only ones that have the vaguest idea of what it is all doing.
Cisco can't do Agile. Agile destroyed Collaboration, UCS, Spark, Telepresence.
What happened to Telepresence?
https://vimeo.com/10270148
Anytime you see people with high self importance, it is a sign the product and business are big flops. That was the case at Collab. People with 100 on scale of 10 self importance, with arrogance and elitism built on top of zero substance. Market has gifted big mirror to all of them since Covid started.
Can I DM you? Am looking to move into the org; am an elite performer here and have some ideas on how to compete and have access to all the data. Am non SWE, but have worked with many big players in the org, but a lot of them left before getting the open req to move over
Agile is a failed methodology for enterprise level development. But alas, the execs are clueless as usual.