Friday, October 21, 2005

Re: cisco to invest $1.1 billion in india

oct 20

cisco says it'll spend $750 million on R&D and the rest on investments in startups. good news for indian techies, given cisco's sterling track record of acquisitions (meaning they don't rape and pillage the companies they acquire, and they acquire approximately one a month).

take that, huawei (the chinese company also has a large operation in bangalore which was functioning out of the lavish leela palace hotel for a while. they are also under the watchful eye of some government types concerned about chinese ipr theft tendencies. i also wonder how many of the alleged 'techies' are actually spies and mitrokhin-type conduits to send cash to maoists in india, to start a nice new rumor :-))

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

face it buddy,
chinese r d biggest ipr thieves d world has evr seen..
besides huawei & chinese companies r security threats..also remember huawei was suspected of supplying comm equipment 2 tailban...can u ever trust d chinese 2 do good work in ind..they wud only indulge in subversive activities....

Anonymous said...

Apparantely the american stocks are not responding too favourably to CISCO's move :-)
Nevertheless its a great news. Its a win-win situation. Cisco gets a huge market (locally) and India gets the latest in internet.
Chambers (President and CEO) said Cisco may also consider manufacturing its networking equipment products in India.

Anonymous said...

Frankly, I care 2 bits about IPR.
It is like US Visa. You first freely get in, plunder, kill and occupy a country and then impose Visa to restrict others selectively. Same way you steal ideas from the old world, colonise to fund marketable "innovation" and then come up with an IPR fence to sustain the lead, so the erstwhile "rendered into 3rd world colonies" do not catch up.

"IPR is good for innovation" is like saying colonisation was good for the colonies because that opened those countries to English, railroads and tea plantations.

If anyone thinks IPR is good for innovation, I would say look at the history of M&A. It is good only for the innovators so they can sell the company to an MSFT or a CSCO. The big ones are not always for sustaining innovation- read threat to existing power balance- so what happens ultimately is, the product gets killed (like CSCO did for Procket, Stratacom, Lucent killed Nextel due to Juniper relation etc) or diluted into something that the innovator would have balked at (like integrate the code in an existing product so you can price the existing product better but end up killing the original idea).

Nope, IPR does not help innovation at all (read end-user), just like the Visa system does/did not really help the end-user of products of services -as exemplified by a drop in Visa applicants in the past 2 years, companies figured that outsourcing is cheaper and good for the customers than costly Visa processing.

Just like VISA was an artificial tool to sustain competence in high-tech areas, IPR is also a tool to build and sustain corporate monopolies and power-structure but does not do any good to innovation per se.