On Sat, Aug 28, 2004 at 10:28:24AM -0700, Michel Py wrote:
Economics 101. Cisco (and many other vendors, BTW) are not charities. Their purpose is to make investors and shareholders (which includes me) happy. And yes, this includes reselling OEM hardware at astronomical prices when they can, because it never lasts long.
Obviously. But us folks who run networks aren't charities either (though given most folks' current economic status, they might as well just become 501(c)(3)'s and call it a day). A few of us actually have business plans that involve something other than scheduling our next chapter 11 filing, which every so often requires the use of that squishy thing between your ears. Smart folks understand that router vendors are reselling optics for 10x-100x the price they can actually be purchased for. Obviously it is the job of the vendor to try and squeeze as much money out of their customers as they possibly can, but at least smart folks have the CHOICE not to take the bait. We start to get annoyed when the vendors remove that choice by engaging in practices like locking down GBIC/SFP modules by vendor ID codes for no reason other than to force customers into paying absurd markup for their optics, intentionally designing interfaces with fixed optics so that you have to purchase more cards than you might actually need in order to have the necessary optics, etc. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)