Cisco to Kill Linksys Brand Name

Mav sent in this article that opens, "In a roundtable with the European press, John Chambers confirmed the "end of life" of the Linksys name, being replaced by the new and redesigned Cisco branding." He explains, "It will all come over time into a Cisco brand. The reason we kept Linksys' brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there's very little advantage in that."

Re:Should have been the plan from the beginning

[djblair]

Agreed, but they need to get a product that lives up to the Cisco name first. Linksys is really the best of the residential routers, but they still crash frequently and that just isn't inline with Cisco's reputation of rock-solid hardware. Putting the Cisco brand on theser could spell disaster. Let's hope the few years the change will take is spent bolstering the quality of their consumer device line.

Oh, and has anyone else noticed the new cartoony cisco logo now appearing on routers and switches? I'll save my bitching until one actually goes bad.

I'm not sure this is a good idea.

[djh101010]

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure some reallllly smart marketing type people at Cisco ran some sort of study or something but, Linksys is consumer stuff. Cisco is enterprise stuff. Why dilute the brand for the enterprise stuff with consumer-grade equipment being associated with the name? Then again, where is there more money to be made? Not sure I have an answer but I'd be interested in hearing what others think about keeping the identity separate vs. combining them into one. Seems to me that "Linksys, a division of Cisco" would be as confidence-boosting as calling it Cisco, to the consumer. And I'd prefer to know that if something says Cisco, it's the real deal, not some 60 dollar best-buy grade piece of switchgear.

The Best To Come Of This

[nuintari]

The best thing I see coming from this, there will longer be a Linksys WRT54G. After revision 5, it has to be the single crappiest router in history, amplified by the fact that all the chums at Best Buy own pre-version 5 routers, which are rock solid, and have no idea why I insist that any recent release is pure shit. They constantly tell my customers that it is the finest router money can buy, and my customers, being the idiots they are, listen to the minimum wage dumbass patrol at Best Buy instead of their ISP. Why people think a sales monkey knows more about networking than a networking guy, I'll never know. The end result is always the same, their service is fine, the router I told them not to buy locks up every damned day, and this is somehow my fault.

Even if Cisco releases the same router with a new brand name, there is a good chance that the sales drones won't recognize it, and I can stop saying, "I told you so," to my customers.

well won't that just be neat

[atarione]

you do can have a crappy $20 (on sale at bb) home router that says CISCO Sytems on it...whoopdy do

it is kinda sad how much crappier the home stuff is built over the last few years as the home networking stuff became more commoditized.

my old RT314 router had nice rugged metal housing and plethora of status lights now you get a cheapy plastic housing and 1 light be port if lucky.... not to mention crap like the cutting in half of the RAM on the WRT54G and other bs cost cutting moves by linksys on that product making later wrt54g garbage.

but i don't entirely care cause i use a old PC / monowall for my routing / firewall needs. and I have a nice rack mount switch i picked up off ebay for very little...

Re:Should have been the plan from the beginning

[Endo13]

I have to agree with you 100%. GP apparently hasn't had a lot of experience with many models of many brands of consumer-level networking equipment. I after testing/installing/configuring hundreds (probably thousands, I really haven't kept track) of consumer networking equipment parts, no brand in my experience has had nearly as a high a failure rate as Linksys. And I know this next bit is going to seem an exaggeration or a troll, but it's not. In the dozens of Linksys routers and switches I've worked with, I've actually had over a 50% failure rate. Admittedly, with my job I generally only get called in only to solve problems. But the fact is, when I get called to a job where a Linksys part is involved, more than half the time that part must be replaced. When other brands of networking equipment are in use, it's rarely a defective part.

Re:One word - Inprise

[tomhudson]

They have two great brand names. It would be silly to kill one of them off, since they use them to segment their markets. If they were both aimed at the same buyers (a la "Nissan" and "Datsun" back in the day) I could understand rationalizing the nameplate, but this is just a waste.

If they wanted to, they could always do "Linksys by Cisco" - reaping the benefits of both brand names.

Re:So what happens now

[Short Circuit]

My prediction: They'll attempt to build consumer-grade products using their enterprise technology. Because it won't be a perfect fit, you'll get quirks in the consumer-grade products. The consumer-grade division will make demands on the engineers behind the enterprise technology, to get a better-fitting product. The changes to the enterprise technologies will inadvertently cause problems in those technologies fitting in with their enterprise customers.

Long story short, Cisco's enterprise products will lose market share to their competitors, and Cisco will do one of three things: 1) They'll pull out of the consumer market and focus on their enterprise customers. 2) They'll work to keep their enterprise and consumer product divisions separate, even if it means duplication of effort. 3) They'll do neither, decrease in value, and get bought up by an equity firm to be sold off for parts.

Killed by Broadcom

[jihadist]

The linksys brand was solid, until their routers started using broadcom chipsets, and immediately began to suck. Millions of people who would have bought linksys if their "computer literate" neighbor had been able to recommend it thus did not buy linksys. Cisco, being smart MBAs with the souls of paperclips, have now decided to use a brand everyone still trusts before they pump up sales and ditch the company to toolish shareholders before retiring to Cuba.

Re:So what happens now

[jollyreaper]

Does the consumer stuff get better, or the enterprise stuff get worse?

I think we know the answer there. There's a reason why most companies try to keep professional and consumer gear segmented. Consumers may not even know what they're looking for, especially when it comes to geek stuff like networking gear. Professionals are going to be the ones who usually see through the bullshit, will notice when a trusted brand starts to suck eggs, and will move on with barely a tear shed for nostalgia. Cisco's branding is "we're big boy professional gear so you're going to pay to get into our league." Given the way these trends usually go, this just means that the consumer-end stuff will be typical cost-cutting Mickey Mouse bullshit and the pointy-haired bosses and marketing weasels will push for that same approach in the professional end.

Anyone read the articles about how Wal-Mart would approach companies whose brands are positioned as high-quality and asked them to spank together some cheap-ass China-made crap to market under that brand-name? The article I'm thinking of in particular is Snapper lawnmowers. The Snapper people finally told Wal-Mart where to stick it because it was impossible to make a quality mower at a Wal-Mart price, they'd have had to whore the company name and ruin their reputation to do it.

Hopefully I'm overreacting here and this won't even be a speed-bump for the company. But I'm thinking back to that topic yesterday about "dead companies with good products" and my Spidey sense is tingling.

Please stay hackable

[Gothmolly]

As the owner of a WRT54G and NSLU2, I can run my entire home network on 2 linux servers consuming, together, under 20 watts.

Will the Cisco-ification of Linksys stop this from happening in the future?

Re:So what happens now

[chuckymonkey]

That's why I don't buy any router that I can't run DD-WRT on. It adds so much to the system and takes nothing away.

This probably means nothing for quality.

[liftphreaker]

How does this affect product reliability and quality? Will we start getting better stuff than the crap linksys junk I've had the misfortune of using so far?

Every single Linksys consumer / home wireless product I've used has been much more expensive and worse quality than even cheap taiwan made no-name brands or stuff like planex which costs 1/2 as much as linksys in terms of product life and reliability.

Re:The Best To Come Of This

[Aladrin]

Aye, I had a version 2 that was a GREAT router for quite a long time, before lightning got it. I ended up 2 of the later models that were horrid. If there's ever been a case of milking a great name ('Linksys wrt54g', in this case) this is it.

I'm not surprised that Cisco thinks the Linksys name has been milked out and is moving on to milk their own name now. I'd bet this has nothing to do with increased Cisco name awareness and everything to do with Linksys being synonymous with 'crap routers'. I don't know anyone who will use their routers any more. (I was the last one.)

For the record, I have a D-Link DIR-655N and it's been great, if a wee bit pricey.

Re:So what happens now

[Guspaz]

Actually, they were all identically easy to flash up until they switched them to vxworks to save money with the v5 hardware. And even then, there was the WRT54GL v1.0 and v1.1 that were just as easy to flash as before.

So, no, they didn't get "progressively worse to flash". When they forked the models, one fork was just as easy to flash as before, and one was harder. Then again, this would only matter to somebody who continuously bought new models without paying attention to if they were buying the Linux models orn ot.