"But social networking, steaming media...a lot of this stuff sounds familiar. Cisco is moving into an extremely crowded market."

Right. Paris icon for the "social networking, steaming media" combined with "familiar stuff" and "extremely crowded market".

I call for a Hat Trick Award Ceremony of some sort for this.

Speaking of tricks I think that...er, can I post a getting my coat icon on this also?

Down in Oz , they have a christmas hamper people called crisco , oh I can't wait for that christmas hamper delivered to my door by cisco !

"entertainment operating system", "social networking platform", "software-as-a-service", "paid through advertising"

Sounds very much like something i'd want to avoid.

"But social networking, steaming media...a lot of this stuff sounds familiar. Cisco is moving into an extremely crowded market. The living room is a dangerous place."

Was that a Freudian slip revealing the next Generation of Cisco Control for Steamy Windows? . If they create "in-house" content .....and for a Telecommunications Router that is as simple as connecting Media Source Players with each other to Create Enhanced and InterNetworking Content via nothing more difficult than Following their Actions/Virtually, Thoughts Realised, as they Communicate and Interact with Incumbent Moribund Status Quo Systems ....Sub-Prime Performers.

MeThinks, you should know that would be a Surefire Winner for AI HyperVisor Mentoring in Future Reality Presentations for Beta Perceptions Management. Big Brother in a White Hat ...... Cruisin' on Patrol in the Perfumed Gardens of the Red Light Zone. A Living Space which doesn't Suffer Fools at all and Delivers on ITs Promise Sublimely. Can you Imagine a More Powerful Driver than the Lure of Venus and Mars XXXXChanging Natural Passions. Surely anything and everything else would be just Artificial and designed to Deceive for Unnatural Purpose.

Bravo, Cisco, Kid I U Not. Game On? Wanna Dare 42 Play Win Win with Ultimate Relativity Probability Drivers. Would aman say ..."Let the Best Woman Win"? :-) Or would that be too AESThetan/Alien a Concept for Machiavellian Machismo .... Neanderthals.

Crikey, that swooped into Mission Impossible Scientological Space. Better say Hello. Hi, Tom/Katie, how's IT hangin'? What do you Think of the Script? Does ITs Code Register and $ignal BlockBuster? AI NeuReality Project for Astute NEUKlearer Productions in Orders that Create Dynasty and Destiny?

<Ping>

Thanks, El Reg, you're Playing AI Blinder and deserve a medal for Services to the Nation above and beyond the Call of Duty.

Slight problem with the home networking milarky if they are just going to rebrand the Linksys stuff, is that a lot of the Linksys stuff is utter tat. If they end up just sticking a badge on that, all they are going to be doing is devaluing the logo, not improving it.

It's another Borg-inspired initiative! Let's see... we've got MS, Google and Cisco. Or rather, in about 10 years (I'm being optimistic here, we've probably got far less), everything(ish) technical will have one of those three brands. That's it.

By then we would've started colonising other planets, and then each corporation gets a religion (where's Jobs when you need him?), and interplanetary wars follow.

Heck, bring it on!

If they don't manage this correctly it could also devalue the brand to "something for end users"..

...When is there going to be an option in babelfish to translate amanfromMars or am I the only one??

Methinks the Reg can knock one up...(ooh err)

(and where is the mars logo for amanfromMars?)

Cisco already have a religion or should I say brainwashing cult. It's called CCIE.

Try mentioning the fact that there are other manufacturers of networking equipment to a CCIE and they will insist you are burnt at the stake as an Infidel.

:-)

CC Learning, as far as I can tell is part of their marketing stratergy, and that's where and why they're sucessful.

1) Build some dodgy kit

2) Ensure everyone pays you to become certified on dodgy kit.

3) Ensure only certified techs get access to support*

4) Customers feel tied in to a product as they've spent $$$ on training.

* is they key differenciator between cisco's sucess and nortel/juniper/avaya/etc's failings

yes you can do juniper trainig, but does anyone care?

And lets all wait for the day they realise their policy of making owners of their equipment (users, businesses, or personal) pay for upgrades to cover faults in their own firmware won't wash in the living room.

Might be good for businesses to sort of the mess of unpatch IOS's and other bits. I think as good as Cisco might think they are - they have all the "consumer savvy" of a brick.

Consumers just are not as "forgiving" or tolerant of that cr*p compared with businesses.

Looks like a good way to destroy your own name if you are not careful.

Great to see the amanfrommars bot back in action. If only we knew where it sourced it's "learning", then we could teach it to respond to certain words with a torrent of filth - ala MSNs Santa. We could teach it equate "Microsoft" with all kinds of colourful metaphors and give it a /. login. Good times!

...that "cisco" in Spanish has a not-so-shiny-company meaning. A good translation would be "fucked up". Also, "ciscar" means to take a dump, or to shit oneself.

this aint for me. last thing i want to see when i get home after 12 hours of gruelling router reconfiguration is THAT 'tesco value logo' that CISCO adopted under my 50" plasma

We thought he was for a while but interspersed between the bs is a fairly dry and cynical wit I don't get everything he says but once in a while the marslolspeak slips icanhasmartian.

Putting the Cisco name on products is all well and good, but they still have a Corporate mentality (and monetary expectation) when it comes to support. Drivers for any LinkSys product are freely available on that website, but should you be unfortunate enough to misplace your install CD for a CB21-A/B/G PC card, and dare to write Cisco for support because you can't quite seem to find the download link on their site, they'll ask for your service contract before proceeding.

Seems like there's a teeny difference between a $150 laptop wifi card, and a $50K router. Say, $49,850 ???

If Cisco wants to further penetrate the home market, they'll need to take the purchaser's wallet into account when providing support.

As it sits now, if Cisco is stenciled onto the case, they'll want money to download drivers. That's not going to sit well with Joe User.