Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Unfortunately, Cisco decided to see how well they could "monetize" (gads, I hate that word!) it:
- Create a "marketplace" for features built into many routers? Check!
- Sell people's internet history to the highest bidder? Check!
- Force the upgrade and provide no way for people to opt-out? Check!
I'm really trying to image the product management meetings that created this travesty. Did the meetings happen after somebody came and said, "You know, we could make administering these routers a lot easier by making it so users don't have to," or were the meetings more like, "We have a lot of users. How could we package things so we can sell all their data"? Did it start benign and turn malignant or was it malignant from the get-go?
Regardless, I can't imagine being willing to screw my customers like that.
Cisco tried it previously with their attempt to marry a VoIP phone with an Android tablet.
From an MBA point of view, Linksys is a problem -- it's a commodity product with low margins that was only acquired to protect Cisco's high-profit small router/switch business. Focusing on improving the user experience makes your $80 router a $150 router (ie. Apple's strategy in this segment), which doesn't help the bottom line -- the world doesn't need another AirPort Extreme.
Instead, you can turn your router into a "monetization" machine and extract recurring cash flows without changing the product price-point in a competitive market.
So let me get this straight, Cisco feels that they have the right to shut off your Internet connectivity IF:
1) They don't like what you say.
2) You watch porn. (Or anything they consider pornographic, which may not agree with your definition of pornographic; see corporate Internet filters.)
Well, that just proves to me that they have no idea what the hell they're doing, and have just permanently lost me as a customer.
And I think those terms have been removed anyway.
[1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-st...
I don't pretend Tomato firmware are the first to allow to do so, but I just found it was an interesting and usefull thing.
Also, if you are in the market for an upgrade, my friend showed me the new Asus RT-N66u. I likey n16 but the new one has a faster CPU and more RAM.
So the router is tracking your online activity and they will terminate it if they find you've been using it to watch porn or content not deemed legal. I'm guessing not many people from Hacker News will be able to do much with their routers if they start enforcing this.
Cisco is scared, because for most people there is not a need to upgrade your router every 2-4 years. Router oses generally suck less than windows. Internet is not even >25mbit/sec in most places in the USA.
I have just added Cisco to my list of hardware companies never to buy from.
For instance, Marshini Chetty, a researcher at Georgia Tech, has been working on a project called Kermit[1] to provide increased visibility into home networks, mainly to provide QoS (e.g. you can determine your teenager is hogging the bandwidth with video streaming and throttle him back). However their system generates a lot of data, too much to process on the router itself, so IIRC they schlep it over to a PC running on the network. If this were coupled with a cloud service, you wouldn't need to keep a PC running all the time. I'm not sure how much of a market there really is for this, though in a presentation she said they had done a study where they put these in average people's homes and received a positive reception.
On a different note, I find the outrage about this (both here on HN and elsewhere) somewhat ironic because the privacy policy isn't that different from the privacy policies people put up with everyday with other cloud services they use. I think it's just when it's put in contrast with the status quo of routers (not in the cloud and with good privacy guarantees) that people find it outrageous. This is not a comparison people make with other cloud services; perhaps they should.
Somewhat of a difference there.
They've obviously already solved that problem... this article is about an update that was automatically installed. It wasn't part of a "cloud service" when they bought it.