Dell hardware (was Re: [rescue] Current collections...)

[Nadine Miller]

Phil Stracchino wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 01:36:28AM -0500, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> 
>>Testing that one cisco switch is what has caused me to vow never to buy a 
>>piece of their overpriced trash.  IOS may be "beautiful," it's something 
>>I've never touched before, but for the post part it's something I don't 
>>care much about, and isn't worth a 500% increase in price.
> 
> 
> I'm told by people in the know that the major reason the Juniper guys
> split off from Cisco and formed Juniper was because they kept telling
> Cisco, "No, no, no, you can't do that, you need a separate processor to
> handle all of this stuff, otherwise the box is going to fall down or
> just max out when you hit such-and-such a total throughput.  It can't
> handle wire speed connections on all ports."  And Cisco kept saying, "We
> can't do that, that would cost more money."
> 
> So the engineers said, "Fuck this shit, let's go do it right," and went
> off and created Juniper Networks.

There was a lot more to it than that.  I'd venture to say that it 
was a lot more about software development process and management 
response to engineers in general than it was about hardware.  I 
also know that there was a lot of "defensive" manuevering by some 
  of the high middle managers during that period to bring on 
chronies--I call it defensive b/c I think it was an attempt by 
them to protect themselves by having friends around during a time 
when there were a huge number of aquisitions going on.  That's 
how we ended up with a lot of managers that had worked at Tandem, 
for example.

The "straw" that broke the camel's back, though, I think, was 
Tony Li leaving.  Once people realized he'd given up holding out 
hope for a change in the process/attitudes, other people decided 
to ditch too.  There was a huge turn-over problem for many months 
after he left.

The only thing that revitalized engineering after that, imho, was 
the aquisition of Granite.  Over 90% of their engineers stayed, 
and all of them could have easily retired.

=Nadine=