Gawker
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geeks gone wild
Cisco Exec Makes Death Threat Over $4,000 Bike
According to the AP, Cisco executives like Joe Burton are brave technology warriors, building the networking giant's post-recession future. According to a guy who runs a Bay Area bike shop, though, Burton's a jackass. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by shag_carpet_bomb: I'll bet it was a road bike. Those guys are total dicks. 8 Responses | Other threads
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perks
Cisco, the Best Lousy Place to Work
How did Fortune decide Cisco was near the top of its "Best Places to Work" list? An unhappy tipster at the networking-equipment maker leaked this report from a company meeting happening now: More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Pope John Peeps II: You know, water's a free drink. Quit being such a pussy. 11 Responses | Other threads
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schadenfreude
A Six-Figure Car at Silicon Valley's Repo Man
The first reaction of those who dwell in California's cradle of technology to the recession was blithe indifference — Wall Street's problem, not theirs. How swiftly they learned otherwise. A tipster sends in photographic evidence.
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By Owen ThomasComment by SherlockAtalanta: Wow, apparently no one here knows anything about mercedes. The "v12 biturbo" sticker he has on the back is not stock.... 4 Responses | Other threads
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meltdowns
Cisco kills Christmas
"There should be no Business Group, Technology Group or Business Unit-funded holiday parties." That's the extra bullet through the heart in an email being sent around Cisco. I've screencapped only part of it, because I promised not to provide any pointers to my leaker. Here's the ASCII text version: More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by GarthSatyr: Cisco has a lot of fat and redundancies .... the financial crisis and economic crash has led to entire segments... more » | Other threads
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cutbacks
Cisco cancels big sales conference
The economic pain continues to trickle down: Cisco is cancelling a two-week sales conference planned for next August in San Francisco. Conferences like this are a combination of boot camp, old-fashioned tent revivals, and frat keggers, held to rev up a company's revenue generators; ostensibly meant to educate salespeople about new products and compensation plans, they more often devolve into debauchery. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by abmw: Shite like that never stops AIG from throwing a wingding. more » | Other threads
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perks
In-house gym Cisco's new profit center
Cisco, the San Jose-based networking-equipment giant, is closing its free campus gyms — and replacing them with a new, larger one for which employees will have to pay $20 a month. In explaining the change, Cisco's HR team has claimed it's subsidizing the price of the gym, as well as other health facilities at the same site by 90 percent. So, what, the gym would actually cost $200/mo. at market rates? Must be some gym. Check it out in this video a Cisco source smuggled off-campus, and read Cisco's memo, which touts the loss of free gyms as bringing a "positive return on investment for Cisco." If you're feeling brave, crash the gym's grand opening on Monday. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Churchill: The video didn't show the gym!!! 1 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Cisco concludes we're all breaking the rules
I'm a liar. So are you. The funny part is, we all know it. A new study by Cisco just confirms it. The 10-word version: "Everyone breaks published security policy to get their job done." None of this is a surprise to your IT department. We long for the day we can punish problem users for violating the pages of acceptable-use policies they signed but never read their first day on the job. Please, please, please just let us ban one guy from the network — pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire said.
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Comment by Paul Boutin: What Tim means is: I use the same password for Valleywag as I do at First Republic. But damned... 2 Responses | Other threads
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Cash Is King
Are tech companies turning into banks?
When Wall Street fails, Silicon Valley must step up. So goes the hubristic thinking here. Debt greases the wheels of commerce, and the sale of servers and software is no exception. And that part of the credit industry has hit a rough patch, too, with defaults on equipment loans nearly doubling in the past year. As with other credit markets, this had made traditional lenders nervous. So cash-rich tech companies are venturing into lending themselves. IBM has long had an in-house lending arm, with $24.5 billion in loans outstanding. Cisco lent $4 billion to customers last year. Even eBay is getting into the game through Bill Me Later; it acquired $550 million in consumer loans in conjunction with the purchase of the payments startup. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by macbeach: It goes with high profit margins. Can't most Apple products be purchased with no money down and no interest?... 1 Responses | Other threads
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arista networks
Andy Bechtolsheim quits Sun again
Billionaire Andreas von Bechtolsheim — "Andy" to us — cofounded Sun Microsystems in 1982. The original Sun team of Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy were like the Beatles to a previous generation of Silicon Valley engineers. Now, Bechtolsheim's using the current imaginary financial apocalypse to plant good news about Arista Networks. "Innovations in Cloud Networking" is the company's meaningless slogan. What Andy really wants to say: Throw those stinky old Cisco routers away! Oh, here's the part where Sun PR tells everyone a lie about Bechtolsheim "continuing his present involvement" at Sun as an advisor. Never mind that — just read the nut from his NYT article. More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by MajellaAgrius: It might have been Ram Shriram, certainly not Vinod. more » | Other threads
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layoffs
Cisco cuts 129 as CEO says "no cuts"
There's a thin line between "cheerleader" and "liar." And Cisco CEO John Chambers likes to wave his pom-poms over it. Speaking at a Gartner conference, Chambers said the company wasn't planning any cutbacks, commenter sample032 noticed. On Monday, Cisco filed papers to start a mass layoff of 129 employees in its Richardson, Texas facility. Not technically a lie, a Cisco spokesman maintained to the San Francisco Business Times, because the company "continuously evaluates its businesses to align human and capital resources to address key growth opportunities and improve efficiency." The new euphemism for "layoffs" is "business as usual."
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By Owen ThomasComment by XenophonJackal: This is hilarious. Chambers has a really bad habit of saying stuff like this. I remember in... more » | Other threads
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Cash Is King
The 10 richest tech companies
Where's the debt crisis in Silicon Valley? The knock-on effects are all too real, but frozen credit markets have had little direct effect on business operations, aside from possibly scotching the debt-fueled sales of Alltel and Nextel. That's because technology companies are run by paranoid sorts who like to keep large cash reserves, in case some upstart renders their market obsolete. In good times, activist shareholders whinged about their parsimonious habits, but the cash hoarders are now sitting pretty — and could be set for acquisition binges. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by CaliforniaCajun: "Apple, $20.7 billion In the '90s, Apple almost ran out of money." It just ain't true. Even in the darkest days of... 2 Responses | Other threads
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We Listen to Robert Scoble So Cisco Employees Don't Have To
No one told Cisco employees Scoble was talking to them
Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, embracer of new technologies and young women, has informed Twitter users everywhere that he is "talking to all Cisco employees this morning ... about the latest Web collaboration stuff." Whom he has not informed: Cisco employees everywhere. "My inbox and trash have no mention of 'scoble' anywhere," a Cisco worker bee tells us. Well, duh — the announcement must have gone out on FriendFeed.
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By Owen ThomasComment by raincoaster: Maybe he spells phonetically. There's a company here called Sysco that provides bathroom and cleaning supplies to restaurants... 3 Responses | Other threads
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acquisitions
Cisco buys AIM-for-geeks Jabber
Why is a router maker buying Jabber, an open-source AIM clone? Disgruntled network admins (I'm still one in my heart) understand what Cisco's own press release doesn't spell out in English. More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by sample032: Why not implement a Jabber client on the switches and routers? That seems easier. 2 Responses | Other threads
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meltdown
5 tech companies getting soaked by Wall Street's meltdown
If Silicon Valley is mentally disconnected from this week's Wall Street mess, it's because ad-supported companies dominate the Valley these days. High-net-worth investors aren't reeled in with cheap banners, so the demise of Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch hardly pinches budgets. Lehman spent just $501,900 on ads, both online and off, in the first half of 2008. Merrill Lynch, which has a much larger consumer business, still only spent $38 million on advertising last year. Still, some 150,000 people will lose their jobs in this week's fallout. That's a lot of tech infrastructure no one will want to pay for anymore. Lehman, for example, spent $309 million on IT last quarter alone. What's more, Lehman's investment banking connections run deep in the Valley's world of startups, VCs and big company buyers. Below, five tech companies that find themselves wishing they could unleash themselves from Wall Street's fate. More »
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Comment by sample032: "New York's most successful tech company is financial information provider Bloomberg..." That's news to IBM. 1 Responses | Other threads
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stocks
10 tech stocks to watch as Lehman disappears and AIG totters
When it became obvious over the weekend that investment bank Lehman Brothers would finally fail and that no one was going to rescue it, Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain realized the market's reaction today would tank his company as well. So Thain met with Kenneth Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, and the pair reached a deal to sell Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for $44 billion. Which is, you might recall, around the price Microsoft wanted to pay for Yahoo. Of course, that kind of offer won't be coming for Yahoo again any time soon. While not so severely or directly, Lehman Brothers' collapse and insurance giant AIG's tottering on the brink will affect your tech portfolio today. Before this morning's open the company's stock was already down 3.83 percent on premarket trading. Watch Yahoo and nine other tech stock's continuing destruction or — dare you hope? — miraculous resilience on live stock charts below. More »
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Comment by ResearchZilla: these are negligible changes, excluding aig - but loading this many charts is a huge browser burden.... 3 Responses | Other threads
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meghan asha
Julia Allison pal's Cisco ad fails Wi-Fi test
Bay Area-raised biotech heiress Meghan Asha, who now lives in New York and egoblogs for fired Star editor-at-large Julia Allison's NonSociety, appears in an endorsement video for Cisco. The "Digital Cribs" lifestyle shoot has a brief product placement of a Cisco Linksys wireless router. Asha claims that she uses the Linksys for her home Wi-Fi network, which she calls "Geeking Out." Wait for the blooper which shows the whole setup's a fake, 23 seconds in: More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Paul Boutin: Meghan has both a Les Paul guitar and a Stratocaster? She's my type. 4 Responses | Other threads
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crash this bash
Guide to sneaking into tonight's Cisco Developers Conference party
A reader writes in with a handy guide to crashing a party Cisco is putting on as part of its developers conference. More »
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By Jackson WestComment by NorthBeach: This post should be titled 'Find the Sausagefest' more » | Other threads
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acquisitions
Cisco spends $215 million on PostPath
Cisco Systems will acquire open source email and calendar software-maker PostPath for $215 million. Cisco VP Charles Carmel says the company will integrate PostPath, usually called an alternative to Microsoft's Exchange, with WebEx software, which Cisco acquired for $3.2 billion in March 2007. It's only big-spending Cisco's fourth buy of the year — for the networking giant, a tightening of the purse. There were zero tech IPOs last quarter and also relatively few major acquisitions. Which means PostPath investors Matrix Partners, Jafco Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners are no doubt gluttonously bathing in the schadenfreude this morning.
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Comment by pleinad: No Chambers is going after the Corporate market. For example, many companies uses Yahoo messenger for voice and chat but... 1 Responses | Other threads
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nerdspotting
Woz speaking at Cisco
We hear Steve Wozniak — he's the Apple cofounder who doesn't rain expletives on reporters — is speaking at Cisco at 11:30. We're curious what he has to say. Update: A reader sent in the photo above, and another eyewitness wisecracked: "It's like they transferred all the fat from Jobs to Woz." Ouch! Even former Woz flame Kathy Griffin wasn't that harsh. Any other Cisco tipsters care to send more? Below, a clip from another Woz talk at Google last year: More » -
Charles Giancarlo
One-time heir apparent to Cisco CEO Chambers takes over Avaya
As current Avaya CEO Lou D'Ambrosio steps down due to health related reasons, Charles Giancarlo will move from his role at Avaya's owner, private equity firm Silver Lake, to interim CEO. Industry watchers long expected Giancarlo to take the CEO's office — just not at Avaya. Word has it Cisco's John Chambers wanted Giancarlo to be his successor. When Giancarlo left Cisco in December 2007, Chambers told reporters: “Charlie’s been one of the very few leaders that I’ve lost out of Cisco when it wasn’t the right time to lose him."
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Comment by PhilDewey: How many ex-cisco Chambers wannabes have made it to the top spot elsewhere and been successful? None that I can... more » | Other threads
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rickroll
Cisco never going to give you up, never going to let you down
I've always suspected vast swaths of Cisco, the boringly profitable networking giant, were stuck in the '90s. An exchange forwarded from an internal mailing list confirms it. First of all: forwarded from an internal mailing list. Haven't these people heard of wikis? Second of all: They're complaining about files being deleted from an internal FTP server. Hello, isn't storage supposed to be in the cloud? The email chain ends with equally dated complaints about misuse of the "reply all" button. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by lena.: Passive aggression at its finest. Perhaps even more amusing than the rickroll are the 3 articles about reply all... more » | Other threads
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green with envy
Microsoft kicks Amazon.com's spandex-clad butt in bicycling to work
Microsoft employees have logged 2,605 days of riding their bikes to work, with an average commute of 19 miles in a day, since the start of the year in a contest sponsored by the Cascade Bicycle Education Foundation for organizations in the greater Seattle area. That's more than twice as many days and three times as many miles as Amazon.com employees, ranked eleventh behind even the lazy slackers who work in Seattle's municipal government and the academic wankers at the state university. How are Valley companies doing? More »
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By Jackson WestComment by Norcross: if my employer offered a place to shower, I'd consider it. but being that it's already over 90 degrees here... more » | Other threads
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yahoo raid
Yahoo board member Ed Kozel quits
Yahoo director Ed Kozel is leaving the besieged company's board to focus on relocating his family to Europe. (Yes, the statement says he's "spending more time with his family.") Kozel, a former CTO of Cisco, was thought to be a proponent of keeping Yahoo independent. Yahoo is not replacing him. [PaidContent]
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By Owen ThomasComment by tech-yahoo: well, this is the scary beginning to the end... If the board starts falling apart, it will get ugly when... more » | Other threads
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exits
Cisco's Jayshree Ullal, head of $8 billion business, leaving today
Jayshree Ullal, a 14-year veteran of the networking giant, is leaving the company, we hear. "Going-away party today at 3:30, Cisco Campus, Building 3," our tipster tells us. Ullal, one of a few female top executives at the company, ran the company's $10 billion datacenter, switching, and security group. Unlike most Cisco executives, she seems to have a sense of humor. Her recent keynote at the Interop conference was plagued by audio problems. "Is it my hair?" she joked at the time. Anyone know where she's headed next? Let us know.
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By Owen ThomasComment by dotcomcowboy: I think she's going back to being Steve Buscemi more » | Other threads
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labor
Janitors picket Cisco in hopes of raises and healthcare
SEIU Local 1877, which represents area janitors, was out in force at Cisco today. The union's contract expired at the end of April, and it looks like the threatened strike has materialized here, as well as in Los Angeles. While the perception is that even service employees can become millionaires in the Valley, that's only if you get equity and happen to work for a company that succeeds. The reality? More »
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By Jackson WestComment by matto: When I wanted better pay, instead of standing around complaining, I got a better job. That seems easier. more » | Other threads
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earnings
Cisco earnings up, net income down reports CEO John Chambers
Network equipment manufacturer Cisco reported a 10 percent increase in revenue to $9.8 billion, but a 5.4 percent drop in net income due to operating and acquisition costs. Trading volume spiked just before the closing bell, but the stock gained only a tenth of a point over yesterday's close. [WSJ] (Photo by AP/Michel Euler) -
online advertising
Lessons from Ad:tech: Facebook needs to pack the crack pipe for Madison Avenue
What can Facebook, MySpace, Google and the rest do better to sell advertising to big buyers like Target, Coca-Cola and Cisco? Cisco's Web marketing director Michele Gibson told an Ad:tech crowd yesterday that Web publishers could make it simpler to purchase large lumps of targeted inventory in one go. With TV, she said, "you can get a million dollars worth of advertising in one phone call. With targeted ads, it's too complicated." More »
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Comment by Winston Smith: I prefer the heroin approach. You start off by giving the ads away for little or no price, then once... more » | Other threads
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cutbacks
Cisco preparing for downturn?
Cisco has told some managers to limit expenses and use up accumulated vacation days. In February, Cisco cut growth targets to 10 percent from 15. CEO John Chambers also warned that the current slowdown in growth could last from two to five quarters. Why not just offer buyouts to employees who are unhappy with the company? That seems easier.
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Comment by dalejo: Companies forcing employees to use up vacation time on the books is nothing new. Hasn't anyone here worked for... more » | Other threads
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blogging for dollars
And now, how not to blog on the job
Cisco intellectual property lawyer Rick Frenkel is a case study in how not to mix your personal blog with your day job. Frenkel wrote the anonymous Patent Troll Tracker blog about "those thought to opportunistically act against alleged patent infringements," reports Forbes. Eventually, Frenkel blogged about a case in which Cisco was the defendant. Guess what happened? More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by sample032: Who actually tells his manager about what he does outside work that might be a conflict of interest? Other than Paul,... more » | Other threads
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surveys
Cisco employees: are you happy?
A tipster sent us this year's Cisco employee survey. It's 55 questions of "strongly disagree / disagree / neither agree nor disagree / agree / strongly agree / don't know" goodness. Strictly speaking, employees aren't "required" to fill out the survey, but they are strongly encouraged to do so. Welcome to the Fortune 500. If my boss sent me this nonsense, I'd circle "don't know" for every question. More »
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Comment by eth0: @dalejo: Yeah, I think it's a bit of a stretch for an HR survey at Cisco to pull that kind... more » | Other threads
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the chart
2008 has not been kind to tech stocks, especially the Valley's leading lights.
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great moments in hr
Cisco cuts mid-year bonuses
Shareholders have already figured out Cisco's not meeting expectations. Now employees are feeling it, too. In good times, Cisco employees get a mid-year advance on their annual bonus, paid in March. But managers have just informed their charges that they're getting half the usual amount. Cisco bonuses start off ranging from 4 percent to 60 percent of one's annual salary, depending on pay grade, and are determined by a maddeningly abstruse formula: More » -
cisco
Cisco CEO John Chambers warns of slowing tech spending
Spending on hardware and software is slowing, Cisco CEO John Chambers said yesterday. Faced with big-picture uncertainty, U.S. and European customers are becoming "increasingly cautious" Chambers told analysts during yesterday's earnings call. He said Cisco sales slowed in January after a solid December. One analyst said the warnings were "more harsh than I expected." (Photo by World Economic Forum)
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Comment by JohnEarnhardt: More on our earnings, as well as a video interview with John Chambers and BusinessWeek's Peter Burrows can be viewed... more » | Other threads
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earnings
Cisco's second-quarter revenues grew 17 percent to $9.8 billion, surpassing the consensus forecast of $9.8 billion from Thomson Financial. Cisco reported net income of $2.1 billion or 33 cents a share. In the same quarter last year, Cisco reported a net profit of $1.9 billion, or 31 cents per share. [Marketwatch] -
politics
9,388 in Santa Clara disappointed to learn Edwards no longer running
The top ten employers in California congressional District 15 include Cisco, Stanford, HP, Lockheed Martin, IBM, Intel and Google. Here's a hearty congratulations to the 9,388 of you voted for John Edwards. Good job. Too bad he isn't running for president anymore. Absentee voting by mail, a popular option in California, likely explains their votes. Another 8,104 of you voted for a guy — Mike Huckabee — who thinks Noah coaxed a T-Rex on board the Ark. Next time, if you want to participate in civic affairs, why not spend the afternoon editing Wikipedia? Here's how the rest of Santa Clara County voted, according to the Mercury News. More » -
broadband
New Cisco switch to make you feel less guilty about destroying the planet
Cisco is introducing a new $75,000 piece of networking equipment, the Nexus 7000. It will, in theory, consume less power while shuttling YouTube clips and videogame downloads to your PC. Great, one more thing to feel guilty about: How your bandwidth consumption contributes to global warming. Before we know it, every Prius owner in Berkeley is going to be buying one of these things for their home datacenters. -
acquisitions
The three moneybags to pitch at Demo
Another Demo is coming up this January 28-30. Smart startup founders will save their best pitches not for the bored audience — trust us, they'll all be ignoring you and sending BlackBerry emails. Instead, buttonhole the guys with money to spend, starting with reps from Google, Microsoft and Cisco. Here's who they're sending. More » -
cinemanow
Microsoft, Cisco, and Lionsgate are pornographers
Remember CinemaNow, the Marina Del Rey-based movie-downloads service backed by Lionsgate, Microsoft, and Cisco, among others? Its video-streaming service has been left in the shadows by Apple, Netflix and Amazon.com, but CinemaNow's found a way to survive: porn. More » -
jackpot
New Cisco CFO disdains stock options
Frank Calderoni, as expected, has risen to become Cisco's CFO, after the previous CFO's retirement. A document filed with the SEC reveals that among other compensation, Calderoni will receive 75,000 units of restricted stock, currently worth $1.8 million. Unlike stock options, which are worthless if the stock falls below their exercise price, restricted stock is earned even if the stock falls. Telling, I think, that Cisco's top finance executive doesn't want to make a big bet on the stock. (A side note: I found Calderoni's photo on a curiously named website: tools.cisco.com. Good to know Cisco believes in full disclosure!.)
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By Owen ThomasComment by Rock tha Hizzee: @Owen Thomas: That was then. This is now. Ask all your Cisco contacts what they get now. Or do you only... more » | Other threads
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stocks
Merry Christmas, shareholders! Apple stock hits all-time high
With light trading volume because of the holiday, Apple stock hit an all-time high today, closing at $198.80. The company now has a market cap of $174 billion, and has risen 134.32 percent on the year. Apple is now worth about as much as networking giant Cisco. Shareholders are likely reactiong to predictions strong holiday sales for the company, plus possible introductions of new products at the Macworld Expo in January.
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