While your comments regarding the "end of life" concept and how it us often used by both hardware and software vendors to boost sales are perfectly valid, as far as my own experience indicates, there is more to it than you included today.

It is equally true that, as a company gets further and further down the road in time from the release of a product, it becomes increasingly a burden to support that product. In order to afford to create the new products which are to be the next greatest thing, at some point the oldest products have to have a support drag on the company of zero. End of life serves that master just as it does the sales department's need to have a sense of urgency instilled in the customer base.

Many companies will still support products which have reached end of life...they just make it so expensive that most customers realize they are better off going with the new stuff. And those who, for whatever reason, choose to pay the insane fees involved, well, they are a tiny little profit center for the vendor. As long as the fee-based support is more than paying what it costs the company, most don't mind devoting some time to garner than income. Or, even more often, take a cut from support income they farm out to third parties.

For the record, I'm an end user, not an employee of any hardware of software vendor.

Thanks Bob
I know what shares to buy next

Unintended ironies, or prophetic product naming?

- Cisco names it's new product Nexus.

- Nexus is the model name for the replicants in "Blade Runner". Replicants have an artificially short life span of 4 years.

The tactic by IBM is not new. A few years ago, several school districts in Michigan brought suit against the state. The school districts won the suit, and the state was facing a $211 million payout to those districts.

Guess how the state came up with the money for the settlement?

Sure it was a long time ago and the same people are not longer in charge but whenever someone talks about IBM's international operations I remember that they made a boat load of money helping the Nazis kill people more efficiently through the modern wonder of punch-cards while they were selling similar systems to the Allies...

I doubt the IBM f 2008 would have any problem selling equipment and services to any dictator they were legally allowed to; regardless of what it might be used for.

IBM hasn't sold their collective soul, they never had one.

Becomming /more/ International (It's in their name for god sake.) won't just help them continue raking in money, it'll allow them to remain neutral on moral issues like employee rights, pollution and ethical management.

You're certainly right in that Cisco routers start to LOOK like mainframes, but it would be a terrible idea for everyone involved if Cisco tried to convert a special-purpose computer like a router into a general-purpose computer like a mainframe. A router runs an OS, but it's very specialized, and as a result it's much easier to keep stable. A router can keep a 99.999% uptime at a much lower cost than a mainframe, because it's capable of doing far less.

A router can keep a 99.999% uptime at a much lower cost than a mainframe, because it's capable of doing far less.

Do you have any stats to back that up?




It seems to me that mainframe computers started as special purpose computers ( Que Watson's famous there is only a market for 16 computers in the US )and moved into the multi-purpose realm.




Cell phones are also on this path. In 5 years the iPhone v8 will most likely be able to do anything your desktop can do today.




Cable boxes also seem to be on this path as they expand from just changing channels to downloading movies.




To think Cisco wants to remain only in the router world is a bit unrealistic.

"Respect for the individual" was NOT a practice at IBM, it was one of the three basic principles, established by Tom Watson, that made IBM a great company.

Bob's on crack . . .
There are ZERO applications that will run on IOS - ZERO.
Its a different architecture. The sole design goal of Cisco equipment is the transfer of packets and frames to and fro. That simplistic overview gets extremely complicated at the engineering level and it takes every bit of brain power available to configure OSPF, BGP, etc. such that large environments communicate effectively and securely.
Yes routers have hardware.
Yes routers run software.
That's about where the similarities end.

CCIE - Application hosting ?

I seriously doubt it.
Why is it every time Bob goes near something network related he exposes an extreme amount of ignorance or just plain makes no sense at all?
Its almost as bad as his politics.

Good evening:

I agree with Bob on the 7000. It is the only switch that I know of that is designed for 1Gb, 10Gb, 40Gb, and 100Gb interfaces. That kills Fibre Channel and a lot more.

You have to look at the 7000 as a new generation IP services switch driven by Moore’s Law, not a BFS, (Big Friendly Switch) Ethernet switch. Cisco owns 71% of the switch market, and over 100 million switch ports to ship this year.

If cisco says this is big news, it is big news. As a CCIE I suspect that the 7000 and NX-OS will become the new standard for IP fabrics.

I know that many of my clients will be taking the 7000 faster than popcorn at the movies: Fortune 1000, Universities, NAP’s, Governments, Hospitals, ISP’s, SaaS Providers, etc. I do not see the 6500-e coming out of client locations, but moving to the edge of the campus with the 7000 at the core with 100Gb interfaces.

As for you cannot program a cisco switch or router, oh contraire. TCL language resides in the IOS and many applications residing on router or switch are being build all of the time. Just Google and see for yourself.

But if your comments are just ABC, (anybody but cisco) there is no hope, just buy a hub, or bridge.

I really can't stand this corporate VERBAL DIARRHEA. Why do they say 100 million switch ports. Can I buy one switch port , can I buy two? No I can't. This really represents 4.16mil switches if they are 24 port or if I am not mistaken they are on average 48 ports which would make it about 2.08 mil switches. I realize that this does not sound as impressive but it is a real representation of the facts.

Really if we are going to be blowing smoke up the you know what why not just count each individual gold plated connecting wire inside each switch port then we could say Cisco owns 800,000,000 or just round it off to 1,000,000,000 Gold Plated Connector Switch Port Thing-a-ma-jigs. WOW - people would be even more impressed. Since 8 of these gold connection wires are as impossible to buy as one switch port we are all in good company of corporate VD BS spin city. Big numbers for everyone.

I really can't stand this corporate VERBAL DIARRHEA. Why do they say 100 million switch ports. Can I buy one switch port , can I buy two? No I can't. This really represents 4.16mil switches if they are 24 port or if I am not mistaken they are on average 48 ports which would make it about 2.08 mil switches. I realize that this does not sound as impressive but it is a real representation of the facts.

Really if we are going to be blowing smoke up the you know what why not just count each individual gold plated connecting wire inside each switch port then we could say Cisco owns 800,000,000 or just round it off to 1,000,000,000 Gold Plated Connector Switch Port Thing-a-ma-jigs. WOW - people would be even more impressed. Since 8 of these gold connection wires are as impossible to buy as one switch port we are all in good company of corporate VD BS spin city. Big numbers for everyone.

I really can't stand this corporate VERBAL DIARRHEA. Why do they say 100 million switch ports. Can I buy one switch port , can I buy two? No I can't. This really represents 4.16mil switches if they are 24 port or if I am not mistaken they are on average 48 ports which would make it about 2.08 mil switches. I realize that this does not sound as impressive but it is a real representation of the facts.

Really if we are going to be blowing smoke up the you know what why not just count each individual gold plated connecting wire inside each switch port then we could say Cisco owns 800,000,000 or just round it off to 1,000,000,000 Gold Plated Connector Switch Port Thing-a-ma-jigs. WOW - people would be even more impressed. Since 8 of these gold connection wires are as impossible to buy as one switch port we are all in good company of corporate VD BS spin city. Big numbers for everyone.

I do agree with bob.

I used to play the Cisco game but recently switched to HP gear, for their lifetime warranty and free software updates. I faced a situation where to get an IOS bugfix update we'd have to take a switch out of service, have it 'certified' by a Cisco reseller, and could then buy a service contract. This meant buying a new switch to facilitate this process while the first one was in the shop. So we did - HP and sold the Cisco. Folks facing EOL on Cisco gear may want to compare. That's not to say Cisco doesn't have bigger, better gear for the core, but the stuff we used to buy many Catalyst kits for is now called 'edge gear'. Not a big fan of HP as a company, just satisfied with their network gear and equally unimpressed by Cisco's practices.

Life imitates Art

"The Nexus series ... have superior strength, agility, a wider temperature range tolerance, and variable intelligence depending on the model."

"... they had a limited lifespan, the Nexus-6 being genetically designed to have a very short lifespan of just a few years"

Blade Runner - 1982.

"Maybe what IBM is doing is turning itself into a business that is mainly NOT in the U.S. Those rosy forecasts could be based on an active plan to essentially abandon the bottom of the U.S. market in favor of the top of every international market."

Why should we be surprised if more companies don't follow suit? The US remains the freest country in the world generally, but "Big Business" is a dirty word here. The feds pass laws, most of which require the states and private companies to do the heavy lifting.

IBM was great to its employees at a time when no laws required it to be. It was a competitive advantage that attracted some of the best workers. They can still probably do this in some countries, but not here.

Our country has made enemies of the institutions that made us great and sang the praises of those who held us back. Welcome American, your bed is made. Now lay in it.

Mac Beach, you miss the point. IBM was great to its employees back then, but so were most companies. Becuase it wasn't a world economy they could be. Now that they are competing with cheap labor over seas the first thing to go isn't the giant salaries for the top 1% of employees, but jobs for the other 99%. Government intervention didn't bring this about, but it could stop it. Instead we let the free hand of the market carry the jobs over seas. Meanwhile, for most companies that actually manufacture goods, we remain the largest market. For now.

btw I think you've read too much Ayn Rand.

@Craig: What do you suggest governments can do about cheap labour abroad? Protectionism won't work because it will trigger rampant inflation in the cost of goods and services because consumers won't be able to take advantage of that cheap labour. Subsidies won't work because they would impose a massive extra burden on taxpayers. Both approaches would cripple the economy. Retaliatory trade barriers would also hurt american exporters.

The fact is the rest of the world is growing up. They're getting more educated and skilled. The only way to stop that is to bomb them back into the stone age. It worked in Iraq and western contractors have made a mint out of it, but that strategy has massive costs of it's own.

Fortunately those pesky third worlders are actualy developing viable consumer economies of their own, and this is where western companies and western labour can earn a good living. We have a lot of the financial, entertainment and services skills that a consumer economy neds and we can sell those skills abroad. A rising tide lifts all boats, but we have to be prepared for the fact that the world is changing and we need to change with it. Trying to live in the 1950s isn't a long term strategy.

Back to end-of-life (and for the record, I still agree with bob)...

Companies announce EOL (end of life) on products because they :

1. don't want to or can't support that architecture any more (see video cards a la Microsoft operating systems Win95/98/me/NT/2K/XP/V...) either because of changes in the basic structures or the amount of labor involved,or the company gets sold, bankrupt or leaves the market...

2. hit their corporate guidelines (varies for companies) as to how long to support stuff (look at Hauppage for example, still supporting nearly 10 year old hardware)

Most companies really want to sell new hardware, and the old hardware isn't competitive with current product, doesn't generate revenue, and more to the point... (like the XT, the 286, or your last gamer computer) won't run the newest applications.

And besides, the author leaves, the patches are made by others, and eventually... it doesn't even run correctly.

I write software.

-edmund

About IBM, Noah is right on the money. They loved having the Nazis as customers. Internally, their practices were way too totalitarian for my liking. For example, at the end of the day, workers were required to spy on one another to see that no documents (even blank notepads!) had been left out on the desk, since that was considered a security risk. Violations of this extreme security policy were punished by posting very prominent humiliating notices at the offender's desk. Over on the customer side, when I was an IBM customer, I knew I could count on IBM to use FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) and outright deception. This company never respected individuals, and if it's reaping the reward it sowed, we should all cheer.

EOL had been a very real concept as hardware was making dramatic strides. I bought millions of dollars of equipment fully funded by the drop in the electric bill: power and cooling. The new equipment also took a smaller foot print, was more reliable, and was easier to maintain.

It seems that the hardware continues to improve but gains are eaten with increases in software costs. Even EMC disk has a big s/w bill tied to it.

If you want to talk about End-of-Life, go take a look at what Intuit does with its Quick Books software. I'll bet Microsoft wishes that they could be that bold in forcing users out of previous versions of Windows and Office!

Zombie dinosaurs also live forever.

Great! Nexus-themed restacks might keep the CCIE contractor role of my career alive and kicking (replicant style) for a few more years.

Let's hope Global Financial Corps don't implode before they finally get the OK and the budget to start deploying them. Projects galore in Asia.

I didn't know the details of that IBM story. I wish you hadn't buried it under a headline story to which it is not related. (But appreciate your reporting it anyway.)

I've been following your series of articles on IBM for a while now. "...the apparent end of IBM's tradition of respect for the individual." took place around 1986. They don't seem to have much respect for their customers, either.

I worked at IBM for 15 years, and took early retirement in '92. I was there when IBM changed from have "Respect for the Individual" (one of the main IBM business principles "way back then") to "respect for the stock price". My first 10 years there were wonderful. The last 5 sucked hind teat. Maybe IBM hired too many "Haaavaaad" MBA's. Maybe they had one too many "Akers" (not a typo). Whatever the reason, customers and employees come after stockholders, which I feel is why the company is only a shadow of it's former self, and is a company whose time is limited (at least in the US). But then, the first word in the name is "International".

Besides, most of the fat left in the company is between the ears of its upper level executives.

Mac Beach,

I chuckled reading your comment that somehow big business has a disadvantage in the US. As Jim Cramer likes to say, this is a country "of, by and for the corporation" (no thanks to the sleazy bush administration). Big business has garnered every unfair advantage against the US consumer. If IBM can't piss in the tall grass with the big dogs, maybe they SHOULD go elsewhere...or hire a better lobbyist.

Mac Beach,

I chuckled reading your comment that somehow big business has a disadvantage in the US. As Jim Cramer likes to say, this is a country "of, by and for the corporation" (no thanks to the sleazy bush administration). Big business has garnered every unfair advantage against the US consumer. If IBM can't piss in the tall grass with the big dogs, maybe they SHOULD go elsewhere...or hire a better lobbyist.

Esteban Trabajos >"...this is a country "of, by and for the corporation"..."

Government of the gangsters, by the gangsters, for the gangsters would sum it up. Lots of new marks "over there" so that`s where everything is headed now that this local group of marks is beginning to "wise up".

And Mac Beach needs to move on from junior high school nonsense. *Sheesh*, kids these days !

If Halliburton is moving to UAE, I couldn't fault IBM moving to either Europe, Australia or Canada.

Cringe -- Thanks for the explaination regarding IBM business. It iss useful business education................................................................................................................................................................ In regards some of the previous commentors: For anyone who speaks of IBM as some of your commentors do I react the same way every time. THEY HAVE NOT RUN A BUSINESS. Any time you think business should be easy or something is wrong with the way its conducted I want you to consider going into business for yourself. Show me how you make a profit. Show me how easy it is. Then show me how easy it is for you grow this business and have thousands of employees with high wages, medicare tax, 2 X social security tax all still with a profit. Its a wonder anyone at all has a job. Its really a friggin' miracle when you get right down to it. When you consider you have to employ people with dubious understanding of business operation that think you owe them high wages, health care with no true appreciation for the miracle of profitable business and with occassional theft / embezzlement of company property factored in....its a freakin' miracle dollar one of profit is generated. Thus I summarize by saying if you do not like where you work.....VOTE WITH YOUR FEET AND GET A NEW JOB OR START YOUR OWN BUSINESS. You'll get alot more of my respect if you do so rather than crying like some whiney child.

Don't forget about all new CCIE certification books and classes.

Why does Nexus remind you of an *old* mainframe? Well sure, mainframes of 20 years ago had all that stuff - virtualization, multiple different guest OSs, hardware and software redundancy and failover. But mainframes have moved on, and if Cisco wants to compete in IBM's backyard they would surely want to try to catch up to a current mainframe rather than something from 1988.

By the same token, maybe IBM should be looking at using a System z machine to route IP traffic. The coming "z6" chip might be just the thing:
http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/IBM-z6-mainframe-microprocessor-Webb.pdf

Good grief, Bob. Your IBM obsession is getting old. Did they steal your wife and shoot your dog? I'm still looking for those 150,000 layoffs.

I've got news for you. Most of the growth today is outside the US. This is hardly unique to IBM. And it's not going to slow, either. IBM is adjusting, as any company would. Like any publicly-traded company, their first responsibility is to their shareholders. It's called 'business'.

Good grief, Bob. Your IBM obsession is getting old. Did they steal your wife and shoot your dog? I'm still looking for those 150,000 layoffs.

I've got news for you. Most of the growth today is outside the US. This is hardly unique to IBM. And it's not going to slow, either. IBM is adjusting, as any company would. Like any publicly-traded company, their first responsibility is to their shareholders. It's called 'business'.

Declaring my biases, I am an IBM employee not in the US.

Bob, I agree with the Dude.

You need to stop dwelling on IBM, stop obsessing on the past, and contribute to discussions about the future.

If IBM, as a US company, participates in the global economy, then benefits accrue to the US as well.

The discussion should be how to best use this and how to minimize the pain for the people affected, not how to turn back the clock.

Fingerbun

I THINK... no, wait, i forgot....so ill just flame about some minor detail

Comment about "IBM's tradition of respect for the individual" - it was long gone. The 1999 Great Pension Theft was the final nail in that coffin, but employees have been treated like manure since the early 90's.

And yes, Cringely is correct about the strategy of "turning itself into a business that is mainly NOT in the U.S". The mantra within IBM is Globally Integrated Enterprise (a euphenism for offshoring everything that can be) and IBM LEAN (cut resources to the bone in the US through global resourcing).

The issue is that that the company has put cost minimization as it's primary focus - resulting in increasingly poor quality of products and services.

This strategy can only work in the short term. Long term, it is a losing strategy that will fail miserably. The only winners with this strategy are the executives who get their fat bonuses then leave.

As for the poster who wrote "their first responsibility is to their shareholders", one could argue that IBM has done a very poor job of rewarding the stockholders - can we say chronic under performer? Where's the revenue growth?

But the first responsibility of leadership of a company is not the short term stock price for the shareholder - the primary responsibility is to ensure the long term viability of the corporation for the benefit of all stakeholders - stockholders, customers, employees and the communities in which the company operates.

I'm an employee, but also I'm also a stockholder and also a customer.

I've seen many of my high performing coworkers layed off.

I've seen the woefully ineffective and inept performance of global resources.

I've seen products ship late with poor quality due to global resourcing.

I've seen performance penalties paid by IBM for failure to meet contract terms because too many have been layed off.

I have coworkers who are good performers go seven years without a raise.

I myself am among the best and brightest, and have advanced my skills and improved my value to the company, yet I'm making less than I did 5 years ago, while working incredible amounts of overtime.

There's nothing to like about about the leadership and strategy IBM - nothing, unless you're a competitor.

Frank

Um, Bob? Did you even real any of the marketing collateral on the Nexus switches? They're switches: no storage, no unix.

Maybe you want to switch storage protocols and not IP, but data-centres they ain't. Data-centre switches? Sure.

Oh, and everyone is doing upgrades without service interruption these days.

Bob, I've always liked reading you and thoroughly enjoyed Triumph of the Nerds.

Wow, are you way off-base on this one. First of all, the "Catalyst" line from Cisco is the entire switch product line. The includes some lowly "desktop" switches like the Catalyst Express 520, an 8 port 10/100 switch. It also includes the switch flagship, the 6500 series.

The Nexus 7000 is a beast! It will probably supplant old 12k "switches" which are actually routers. NX-OS explicitly includes MDS (SAN switch) functionality so it might supplant those as well. While some of the functionality in NX-OS , which I believe is derived from the CRS-1 code, will filter down into the 6500 it'll be ages before any of that is seen in the lower end switches.

It's taken them 3+ years to start getting Modular IOS stable enough in the 6500's for production use. And that only includes a couple of software modules!

I won't be surprised if 10 years from now NX-OS is still relegated to the data center only and IOS is the king of the still existing Catalyst line.

As an employee I cannot wait for ibm US to sell remaining assets and depart the US permanently, including the executives and their families. Welcome to the 3rd world. Wen you need top-notch employees in America again, good luck. I am ashamed and embarrased to be an ibm employee and am just buying my time(doing very little...catch me if you can)to collect my measley pension.

Bob:

you certainly have spawned a lot of comment, which is a good sign :).

One area I would like to clarify is that the Cisco Nexus 7000 is not a replacement for the Catalyst 6500. The Catalyst is not End-of-Life, and, in fact, the roadmap and related investment in the 6500 still extends for several years. The logic behind the Cisco Nexus family is based on the changes we see in the data center and actually ties back to your mainframe comment.

We see the mainframe or server being fully deconstructed. Where everything was once in one box, we are pulling it apart with the advent of SANs, compute clusters, server virtualization, etc. so an application environment is drawn from pools of data center resources (compute, storage, I/O). In this environment, the data center network now needs operational characteristics similar to a server or mainframe bus. This is where the Nexus comes in--not just to deliver quantitative improvements to the data center network but also qualitative improvement to the data center network and related operations.

IBM is interested in globalization, not nationalization. This means having an average salary range for similar jobs and bands. The people I know that have been affected by the pay cut received little notice in advance. Is this fair? I don't think so. At the core of this are the customers. Take a poll and look for happy IBM customers, they are hard to find. IBM services used to be the gold standard and those days are gone. Essentially, they are focusing on global economies, and taking advantage of the overseas markets. This, while still under protection of being listed as a US company. Stock price is not a measure of long term health. People need to look at other indicators too.