All we do is buy companies to stay relevant. Or should say try to stay relevant. But what's happened over the past few years to make innovation die within Cisco?
12 replies (most recent on top)
Innovation does not necessarily require money. Not true. There are lot of examples for everyone to see.
Cisco is not a tech company it’s a financial management company and has been for decades now.
https://www.nasdaq.com/article/cisco-systems-csco-likely-to-buy-luxtera-good-move-cm1068540
Buying Luxtera?
Look at the engineer to your left. Look at the engineer to your right. One of you s---. One of you are phoning it in. The remaining one is carrying the other two. You're barely keeping up with the TAC cases and making the modest feature updates for the next release. Nobody has the time nor capacity to work on anything revolutionary.
Acquisitions bring in big product upgrades or entirely new products, along with entire engineering teams full of high caliber, highly motivated engineers who aren't burdened with supporting a legacy product line.
Startups provide a he--in hit. The company gets a much needed high... for a while. Eventually though, everyone leaves and you're left feeling worse than before... and your long term loyal staff feel unrewarded and underappreciated.
when you offshore most of your development you get zero innovation in return
Cisco transitioned to a model of acquiring revenue years ago. It just took a while to permeate the entire company. Innovation does not necessarily equal revenue, which is all Cisco is focused on.
Over time you become a highly fragmented company as a result and you have no area of expertise beyond sales and marketing. Eventually you become IBM
Lower IQ H1B/L1 who cheated on their college entrance exams are to blame. My cousin works at startup here in SV where they don't hire anyone whose high school or university education was in India. This is not racism but just to avoid fakes.
Mostly due.to third world H1Bs/L1s which are good for lowering cost but not innovation
Insecure CEOs without a technical background, typically prefer to outsource innovation through acquisitions as a method to maintain power.
Top people are more like a private equity m&a group than a bunch of engineering focussed leaders like say google or arista
Innovation costs money and is risky and hard to manage. The Cisco execs would rather use the money to buy back stock to offset the dilution of their huge stock grants and to keep activist investors happy so that they keep their jobs. It’s much cheaper and less risky to buy a startup once you see that there is a market for the product.