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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (18301)	2/20/2000 11:49:00 PM
From: buck	Respond to of 54805

UF, I know Cisco's path to ascendancy all too well. I fought them in the streets for 8 years before I gave it up. I had to eat, ultimately. <g> Once I quit competing with them, I started investing in them. <VBG> You are 100% correct about IOS. IOS is where they implement all of the open standards, as well as their proposed standards, and some things that are completely non-standard. They do it because their customers need it and demand it. They don't wait around for the IETF to send white smoke up the chimney about this or that proposed draft. Almost every piece of hardware that they sell has a competitor that is technologically superior, but DOES NOT HAVE IOS. Which makes it a non-starter in all but the most bold or ignorant shops. How does this apply to Akamai? Akamai is driving a standard through the IETF, with several others, but I doubt they're waiting around for it's blessing. They have Cisco in the passenger seat, filling up the tank, when necessary. If Akamai can get their standard accepted, it will be fully built into the Akamai software already. It is probably part of the Akamai customer kit, or will be soon. Just like BGP and HSRP and other "new" protocols were part of Cisco's IOS before they were standardized. The question I have to answer is, will Akamai execute the necessary maneuvers to position their version of the standard such that their head start translates into either a Gorilla or a King? Or a freakin' Godzilla? Considering that they have the dominator of the standards world, John Chambers, riding shotgun, I tend to think they will. Regardless, it should be a good race to watch for a while. I'm gonna keep track of the three and see where they go and how the technology changes. Of course, now I've got to sit and puzzle out whether an open standard can lead to a proprietary architecture, or vice-versa, or if a simple de-facto standard is preferable at this stage of the CD game. buck, whose head just exploded...

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (18301)	2/20/2000 11:52:00 PM
From: Atin	Respond to of 54805

Buyers of Cisco gear don't actually see IOS -- they see the standards that the routers talk and they see the interface (the command line, snmp/mibs etc) that is used to configure the boxes. If customers get boxes that "speak the same language", be it the standard protocols, or the command line etc, they will create new monkeys to challenge the gorilla if they are unhappy with the service from the gorilla. But it still is the classic gorilla game -- Cisco frequently has badly designed command line interfaces for things, but the monkey companies still have to duplicate it (like I found out recently while designing packet over sonet stuff for my routers). So we create features (like huge numbers of interfaces, or higher speed packet classification etc) that CSCO can't match yet and hope to steal some customers away. Eventually they will wise up and start to look to fix this and this is actually where the monkey companies hope IOS will be a liability. From what I have heard, IOS has gotten pretty big and unwieldy and might not be very amenable to the kinds of changes required to support huge numbers of interfaces etc. On the other hand, I am still hedging and have my largest position in CSCO! -Atin