Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in WTF is Cisco Doing?

Re: WTF is Cisco Doing?

John Dowdell — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 09:15:19 -0000

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...?

Re: WTF is Cisco Doing?

Antonio Rodriguez — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:51:32 -0000

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.

Re: WTF is Cisco Doing?

trypto — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 20:48:06 -0000

Is "Corporate Social Networking" the "Corporate Knowledge Management (KM)" of the "new" bubble? Huzzah!

Re: WTF is Cisco Doing?

Douglas Karr — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:05:50 -0000

I had the identical thought when I read the note. Weird.

Re: WTF is Cisco Doing?

Jordan Michaels — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:30:24 -0000

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.

Re: WTF is Cisco Doing?

John Wantz — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 15:08:26 -0000

I just want to say that the title to the article is great - It gave me a good laugh.

Re: WTF is Cisco Doing?

P-Air — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 13:04:12 -0000

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.