I like Marc Andreessen and all, but he's one to talk in the WTF category. Wasn't Ning's first efforts a bust. Note, that he's still applying a similar biz model to this new reincarnation. Hmmm...
As for Tribe, their underlying technology platform was worth a lot more than any of the incumbents and redeployed in a diff model could open up some interesting opportunities. Note that Aggregate Knowledge came from some of the learnings at Tribe.
As for Cisco, they've already declared that they would be diversifying into the Web 2.0 world and services, so this is no real big surprise.
John Wantz
· 2 years ago
I just want to say that the title to the article is great - It gave me a good laugh.
Jordan Michaels
· 2 years ago
Ning is Yahoo Groups 2.0. It will be home to clutter and ghost town social networks.
Cisco has billions more and an internal sales force with contact to a lot of enterprise customers. I don't know that they will become a social networking success but the odds that Cisco pulls it off are a lot more plausible than Ning going into optical switches. Marc sounds like a guy who's put $9 million into something that will face massive competition and will say aynthing to create an impression that he's confident.
Doug Karr
· 2 years ago
I had the identical thought when I read the note. Weird.
trypto
· 2 years ago
Is "Corporate Social Networking" the "Corporate Knowledge Management (KM)" of the "new" bubble? Huzzah!
Antonio Rodriguez
· 2 years ago
That Andreessen quote is a cheap shot. Despite the fact that Marc's old "reducing them to ... buggy device drivers" is one of my favorite all-time quotes, this one just begs the retort, maybe Ning actually would be better at building optical switches. After all, the remain unproven as a SNS or even as an SNS-toolbuilder.
John Dowdell
· 2 years ago
Many acquisitions are not about current technology, but are about what that team might be able to build in the future, with different resources. I have no idea if that's the case here, but looking at past products may not be an accurate predictor of future work...?
All Comments
As for Tribe, their underlying technology platform was worth a lot more than any of the incumbents and redeployed in a diff model could open up some interesting opportunities. Note that Aggregate Knowledge came from some of the learnings at Tribe.
As for Cisco, they've already declared that they would be diversifying into the Web 2.0 world and services, so this is no real big surprise.
Cisco has billions more and an internal sales force with contact to a lot of enterprise customers. I don't know that they will become a social networking success but the odds that Cisco pulls it off are a lot more plausible than Ning going into optical switches. Marc sounds like a guy who's put $9 million into something that will face massive competition and will say aynthing to create an impression that he's confident.