Do you know that the CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan, is a former Cisco employee?!?! Funny isn't it? LOL.
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How did lay off meetings for Collab go? Every single person in the product and engineering organization since Jan is proven to be incompetent. That is the fact. So how did they decide who to lay off and what they did tell in the 1:1 meeting? I have decided to make you a scapegoat for everyone else's incompetence because I don't like you enough?
We have a winner!! The “partner” Liz said she has to speak to first before letting us know is google.
The reality is simply.... Cisco is going to be parted just like Cabletron, IBM, HP, etc, etc etc
The best way to free Cisco is to break out the business units and sell them to the highest bidder.
Cisco is 140B with 30B in cash. It does 50 B in revenue a year and movers like GCP could use the enterprise sales team and the links into the big legacy enterprises to help them move their cloud strategy.
It’s important to see that Liz who is responsible for Cloud Strategy is stalling. She acting like a poker player, like she has some ace card but can’t say what it is. My bet is she getting us ready for GCP relationship and next is a purchase of parts of Cisco.
If not ELT is just stupid....
I still don’t know but this site is great for the gossip
Webex from 2011 to 2019 did no development. Snd it started out with 2005 UI
So, it’s toast.
“Our product development team is largely based in China, where personnel costs are less expensive than in many other jurisdictions,” Zoom wrote in a regulatory filing.
Webex development is also based in Shanghai. Only innovation that Zoom did was bring over his Chinese compatriots with old source codes.
ZOOM is Webex 2.0 or Webex Do It Right. The problem of Webex in the past 10 years is lack of strong leadership. All those SVP/VP has no clue what they are doing but alienate the good engineers. And push them to Zoom. Those didn't get offer from ZOOM stays. Chuck tries to be cheerleader for Webex team but remember its revenue is so tiny compared with other products. Does it mean that Cisco is abandoning its switch & router & server which counts 40% of its revenue. I didn't see much investment in that core area. At the end, Cisco will lose at both ends, the new technology which doesn't fly and the legacy technology is sinking
Stock price doesn't reflect product quality or real market share or earnings. However, it does point to some other important differences. The fact is that stock market wasn't impressed with Cisco's answer to the opportunity brought by pandemic.
IMHO, the answer to the original question can be summarized as: While Zoom was walking the walk, Cisco was talking the talk. And to make things worst, Cisco was talking just internally, during all those "All Hands", "Town Halls" etc; Zoom walk is fast paced, our talk is slow as of those trees in LOTR.
That is applicable to anything: product development, marketing, addressing customer issues (like that huge security problem when we hoped it was the end of Zoom), answering to this business opportunity with Covid, or just keeping the hype alive.
But here is the thing: for those in charge of Zoom is their fantastic life opportunity. For those in charge of Cisco Collaboration, equipped with their gold parachutes, the success of the product is irrelevant.
A very perceptive comment. It’s MS Teams that will really hurt Webex, not Zoom.
It’s a shame that it’s taken a pandemic to accelerate Webex product development after several years of stagnation. What exactly were Rowan and Amy doing?
All Zoom’s stock price tells you is that it’s massively overvalued.
While everyone is focused on Zoom a largely consumer oriented , Microsoft is quietly outplaying webex in enterprise space.
In next Gartner quadrant, Zoom has to be in top right and Webex in bottom left. With such huge differences in valuation, both in same quadrant makes zero sense.
Webex responses since Zoom started capturing the entire remote collaboration growth during Coid:
- We don't care about pre school markets. We are not interested in selling to grand ma.
- We are security first. We cant react as fast as Zoom does because product changes take time.
- Zoom is one trick pony. Its valuation is crazy. Its multiples are stupid.
Webex bashed users first, and now they are bashing investors, shareholders and markets for valuing Zoom more. They used every possible and available excuse to cover up incompetence.
Meanwhile at Zoom, just by word of mouth, users have grown by millions. From individual users to small groups to organizations, people have adopted Zoom. Now they are on their way to surpass Cisco valuation. Unbelievable what one employee could do. Now Cisco is fighting to stop comparisons with Zoom. Gone are the days of Webex comparing to Zoom.
It's easy to grow a one product company vs a company that sells 4 lines of products. Esp. since Cisco's revenue is dropping their ability to invest in anything is low. I don't think it's a fair comparison. And remember before Covid hit, the Collab BU was going through it's own turmoil. Consequently, they weren't ready when Covid hit. That being said, I think it's time Chuck started micromanaging his Arch teams, they need a negotiator to work together.
Many years ago and only for a blink-and-you-missed-it moment, Cisco's market cap was the largest in the world.
Zoom has a Price to Earnings ratio of x600 - (Fantasy)
Cisco has a Price to Earnings ratio of x15 - (Realistic)
Do the math if Cisco was valued at a PE ratio of 600
It is beyond STUPID to compare companies by market cap value. That is what investors CURRENTLY (this hour) think the company would be worth in the future. The market can change their views any moment and change those views.
There is more to the stock market that meets the eye and how punters (billionaires) can push stock up & down to make more (billions)
Zoom is a nice piece of software, and there growth is looking strong, but were talking about a company that had 25M earnings last year, it's going to take decades before that 140B market cap is justified.
Cisco will NEVER buy Zoom. Their CEO left Cisco because he was upset leadership wouldn't listen to his ideas on improving webex. He would never sell to Cisco. He's laughing to the bank now while Cisco is hurting.
Zoom has a Market Cap of $140B while Cisco's Market Cap is $168B. How can Cisco afford to buy /takeover Zoom? In the next few weeks, Zoom will be worth more than Cisco.
PS: I work for Zoom. I used to be a Webex engineer 4 years ago.
The servers are in China, come on people!
I'll pile on in a bulleted format as well:
- let's buy zoom
- let's use the same ELT tools that managed to destroy webex
- let's wait and see if the results will be the same (ahem)
- let's lament about deteriorating customer base
remember - it's always the tech, always... your tech needs to be rock solid - you cannot use bean counters and financial engineering to make great products that people want to buy.
- WebEx should be Zoom
- Cisco should have involved into AWS
- Cisco should have acquired Workday
- instead we are selling legacy network equipment. laying off thousands every year due to incompetent leadership.
as an early webex employee and a recent zoom user, here is what i can say about zoom:
- it's fast
- it's simple
- it's easy on my battery
- it's easy on my comp resources
- a/v quality is just great
- it rearely goes down