“Those days when one fretted about egg on one’s tie on a video call are well and truly over”
It would be foolish and premature to label Cisco as one of the overall “losers” in the volatile post-pandemic marketplace. For one thing, it’s still an enormous business in the old-school, heavily configured, special purpose networking device market. On the other hand, it remains a steep hill to climb for even its most ardent customers: in a market where most people don’t realise switches even have configurations, selling switches with hugely complicated configuration options seems a little perverse. However, the amazing variety of Cisco devices supporting IP telephony ought to provide a clue to the hopes and intentions of the company that more or less invented modern Ethernet all on its own.
As such, I didn’t want to miss what it had to say about the brave new world of WFH and wide-area telephony systems. The fact it wanted to say all this at the McLaren factory,
