At 01:29 AM 10/16/96 -0500, Alan Hannan wrote:
Although, I know lots of smart smart smart people who haven't. One of them is looking for a job, and he's not looking at cisco. (not me...)
-alan
Alan; Somebody has to stay out of the cisco orbit to give the others a chance to figure it out. :-) Seriously, I started out with Proteon p4200 routers and I was one of the ones to talk Wellfleet into building a router (me and a hundred others) when what they wanted to sell were bridges. cisco came in third for the NEARnet startup. One of the reasons that cisco has earned its place as Number One is that, to my knowledge, cisco has never terminally screwed a client. No other contender can make that claim with me. I've been screwed by all of them, except cisco. They don't always give me what I want when I want it, but they don't do fundamentally bad things like walking away from the ISP market as Proteon did or wiping out their upper management team as Wellfleet did from time to time. cisco is no longer easy to work with in many respects, there is so much management for a large company. But in the early days, cisco was one of the first companies to turn their customer support inside out on the Net. You could (still can) talk to anyone in the company about almost anything. Not as easy as it was, but it can happen. But you can't get one engineer to hack something into the router code for you on just his say-so anymore. But once you could. I dunno maybe you still can, but I think you have to have megabucks behind you to do it. --Kent