-----Original Message----- From: Sean Donelan [mailto:sean@donelan.com] Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 7:00 PM To: brett.hawn@rcn.com Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: Anyone heard anything Good or Bad about Juniper equipment ? On Fri, 13 October 2000, "Brett L. Hawn" wrote:

I like Juniper as much as the next person, this doesn't however, make me naieve enough to believe that they're going to be able to leap the customer support and technical support hurdles that all the other large companies have hit.

They probably won't. But by that time, everyone hopes there will be a new up-and-coming competitor. The founders will probably be ex-employees who got feed up with the bigness, and started the next company. IBM -> Digital -> Compaq -> Dell -> ???? There are already several companies nipping at Juniper's heels. This is a good thing. When companies start focusing on strategic architectures, alliances, and certifying; they stop innovating. While I agree with the sentiment, can you afford to constantly be swapping out one vendor's equipment for another vendors every 3-5 years? I'll grant that there is a significant amount of 'upgrade' style swapping done already. One however, assumes that folks are getting a reasonable price cut on the new items by turning in the old ones. This isn't nearly as likely to happen when switching to a new vendor for a multitude of reasons including but not limited to: Its a startup, lets face it, they're not going to have the assets to back themselves with if they give monster discounts on hardware from the get go. They can't afford to price themselves out of business. While some of the older companies can afford 'buy back' programs, Vendor Y isn't likely to take Vendor X's hardware as downpaymnet on their stuff. Call me jaded and cynical, I'm pretty well convinced these days that upgrading to the latest and greatest isn't all that great. There's something to be said for stability and working relationships with vendors.