To: mact who wrote (63 ) 8/1/2000 11:29:15 AM From: Geof Hollingsworth Read Replies (1) | Respond to You are missing the point I was trying to make. Buy and cheer for Avici if you want, but if you think they are going to supplant Juniper anytime soon you are fooling yourself (IMHO). But it's not a zero-sum game-Juniper doesn't have to disappear in order for Avici to win a few accounts, much like Juniper's success hasn't driven Cisco into the poorhouse. And Techplayer is right, customer wins don't often come based on pure specmanship. If you talk to Juniper customers (at least the ones I know), they could have enjoyed the required performance by buying from Cisco, but at a much higher cost because of all of the security-blanket features which Cisco provides (and charges you for). If you don't need those features, you can get similar performance more efficiently (and perhaps in a more open environment) from Juniper. In general, I think the start-ups succeed not by trying to be better than Cisco (or from big competitor X) but by trying to be different from Cisco, and as a result to be able to offer a better feature/performance/cost trade-off to a portion of the customer base which is small enough that Cisco won't customize a product (or a price list) for them but still large enough to get the start-up past it's first $100 million in PO's. Put a different way, strategy is more important than technology (all IMHO).
