Gary, I think your viewpoints are very rigid and too black & white.
Remember, nothing should be taken for granted as we see paradigms and old way of doing things turned upside down as result of technological innovations..
Let me give it a final shot at explaining what I think Nortel is trying to do.
If you look at the good old voice world, much of the intelligence, functionality are actually built right into the Network itself (i.e. DNIS, ANI, Voice Mail, Voice/Fax Store & Forward, Follow-Me, etc.etc.)
Why did this happen? Because for lot of the small to mid-sized corporate customers, having your voice mail service provided by your Service Provider made lot of sense since they didn't want to have to fork out $50K for a new Voice Mail system from a third party that they weren't sure what ROI returns they would get.
it seems to me that in the data world, the applications & functionality has mostly resided in the CPE equipment (router) and the Service Provider simply pushed bits around the world in conjunction with the Cisco routers..........now, if you take the analogy of what made sense in the voice world, you can immediately grasp the significance of what Nortel is trying to do. If Nortel can build some of the basic Router functions & intelligence right into their Network Platform and also open up their Data network through an API to allow the Intel's and 3Com's of this world to quickly add some of the custom functions required by On-Premise Routing applications, then presto ---Nortel has effectively pre-empted Cisco from selling their routers into the smaller market segment which has YET to adopt data networking fully. And this is the growth market don't you agree?
Time will tell, but as Bosco says, don't discount anything and please, please do not tell me "developers are smart enough to know that this architecture has been tried before and failed"! Give me a break....if we forever gave up any previous attempt to innovate, we would still be living in the Stone Age. Don't make it sound like what Nortel is attempting to do as some sort of voodoo magic or trying to reverse the field of gravitation......what they are trying to do is actually being done all the time in lot of different technology field and for you to say it can't be done.....that's pretty ridiculous I would say. |
