>Disclosure: i work with equipment manufactured by both nortel & cisco (or
>companies they assimilated) and make every effort to be equally unfair to
>both.
>
>thanks for the clarification about PIM, i was unaware of those
>circumstances. in the original list i forgot hsrp, which-i'm told-falls
>under the "no existing standard at the time it was introduced" category (of
>course, it also falls under the "the eventual standard that emerged is
>different" category).
HSRP has significant ancestry in DEC's cluster protocols. The IETF's
VRRP protocol is functionally almost identical to HSRP.
>
>as best i can tell, one remaining point merits explicit clarification (no
>matter how against my nature that might be)
>
>you point out that we do not know enough about the future to adequately
>answer the original question, but that potentially obscures the fact that,
>like microsoft, cisco is a world-class leader in abrupt directional shifts
>(presumably, the only useful context for the abomination "internet time"),
>so insider knowledge about their long term direction at any given point in
>space & time might not be of much use 12 months hence. i also suspect that
>you are correct about them hedging their bets somewhat, so that it would be
>incorrect to presume that they are focusing on one potential implementation
>of a given technology to the exclusion of all others.
Intuitively, I think there are important differences, at least in
part, for the market of Microsoft and Cisco. The argument is not as
strong in the enterprise networking as the carrier networking space.
In carrier networking, however, the "customers" themselves push the
technologies and may very well introduce approaches of their own.
Even more importantly, carriers have a century or so of using
standards-based approaches whenever possible.
It's informative to look at how well Juniper has competed with Cisco
in the carrier router space, in part because they don't have the
baggage of the legacy mechanisms IOS needs to support. Also, Nortel's
installed base in optical networking is far greater than Cisco's.
I suppose my point is that the carrier market is much more
competitive than the enterprise networking market, which in turn is
more competitive than the market that Microsoft inhabits.
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