Wow. I understand that Cisco wants to sell a service to consumers instead of commoditized hardware. But who in their right mind wants to buy that kind of service?
Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
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Re: Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
#12The author seemed to gloss over the part that really stuck out to me: "...we may keep track of certain information ... e.g Internet history ..." So the router is tracking your online activity and they will terminate it if they find you've been using it to watch porn or content not deemed legal. I'm guessing not many people from Hacker News will be able to do much with their routers if they start enforcing this.
Their TOS says you can't use the service for naughty things, but it's not clear whether your router is part of the service or just a client to the service.
Re: Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
#13Who the hell still runs the stock firmware on their router?
Re: Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
#14This is really just a view into technological companies losing sight from the customer view. Even though the new design is probably meant to be a much better product, newer isn't always better. No matter how much more valuable the new design might be, sometimes the simple change in UI is too much of a hurdle for people and that enough, is something to consider before forcing updates. 37signal's Jason Fried wrote a good article on the topic: http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/jason-fried/you-can-lead-...
Re: Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
#15If this had been done correctly, it probably would have been a great boon for the average person. It would have allowed Cisco's tech support to more easily address problems users are having and allowed Cisco to keep software up to date.
Unfortunately, Cisco decided to see how well they could "monetize" (gads, I hate that word!) it:
- Create a "marketplace" for features built into many routers? Check!
- Sell people's internet history to the highest bidder? Check!
- Force the upgrade and provide no way for people to opt-out? Check!
I'm really trying to image the product management meetings that created this travesty. Did the meetings happen after somebody came and said, "You know, we could make administering these routers a lot easier by making it so users don't have to," or were the meetings more like, "We have a lot of users. How could we package things so we can sell all their data"? Did it start benign and turn malignant or was it malignant from the get-go?
Regardless, I can't imagine being willing to screw my customers like that.
Re: Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
#16If this had been done correctly, it probably would have been a great boon for the average person. It would have allowed Cisco's tech support to more easily address problems users are having and allowed Cisco to keep software up to date. Unfortunately, Cisco decided to see how well they could "monetize" (gads, I hate that word!) it: - Create a "marketplace" for features built into many routers? Check! - Sell people's…
I'm sure it started as the latter. Since Apple's success with the App Store, every vendor wants to turn their platform into a walled garden where they control everything.
Cisco tried it previously with their attempt to marry a VoIP phone with an Android tablet.
From an MBA point of view, Linksys is a problem -- it's a commodity product with low margins that was only acquired to protect Cisco's high-profit small router/switch business. Focusing on improving the user experience makes your $80 router a $150 router (ie. Apple's strategy in this segment), which doesn't help the bottom line -- the world doesn't need another AirPort Extreme.
Instead, you can turn your router into a "monetization" machine and extract recurring cash flows without changing the product price-point in a competitive market.
Re: Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
#17> “In some cases, in order to provide an optimal experience on your home network, some updates may still be automatically applied, regardless of the auto-update setting.”
I have just added Cisco to my list of hardware companies never to buy from.
Re: Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
#18Someone could probably come along and eat Cisco's lunch. I imagine a company using a longevity argument like "routers built to last" or something; a nice commitment to sensible autoupdate; maybe a product that does just what it's supposed to do: route packets.
Re: Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
#19Who the hell still runs the stock firmware on their router?
Every-damn-body that's not technologically inclined. Are you this myopic about everything?