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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank Walker who wrote (15170)	7/18/1998 12:56:00 PM
From: Ove Hansen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

> To clarify post 15158, I was wondering about how much an > equipment customer might get tied to using Cisco's products. > If it is hard for the customer to switch to another supplier, > this is good for Cisco, since it means they will keep the > customer for a long time, and they can keep prices at a > high level. Nothing really stops you from using Cisco routers on your backbone, Ascend for dialin access, Bay for your LAN switches etc etc., apart from problems maintaining skills about three different vendor's equipment, managing three vendors, losing some extra features you always will have in a single-vendor environment, etc. It's like putting computers together: you can build a great PC network: that doesn't in any way stop you from one day plugging in a few Macs, however now you've added somewhat to the administration headache. If you're brave you can solve that easily by throwing out all the PCs and installing just Macs, you then lose some features and gain some others, and you've spend a lot of money, but essentially at the end of the day you're probably getting roughly the same job done. I know a lot of Cisco customers, I've worked for two very large ones in the past, and I can say that not a single one of them are continuing to use Cisco because they feel "locked in". Maybe the quality and customer support has something to do with it...