Ah, the great circle of software/hardware tradeoffs.
Cisco got its start by building specialized boxes to do routing. Before that,
hosts did their own routing. (Before *that*, specialized boxes - the IMPs of
the original ARPANET - did all the routing.) What drove the great changeover
was that doing routing for the networks then appearing was getting too CPU- and
memory-intensive for the machines of the day. Economically, it just made sense
to build speciality hardware that could do the job better and faster.
Today, stock hardware is plenty fast enough, and the necessary memory is cheap
enough, that there's little reason to build specialty hardware. The only
exception is for the actual bit-movers at the high end, where hardware
switching still wins. But the decision making doesn't have to be out in that
hardware. So we re-invent the intelligent networking peripherals that existed
back when hosts were doing the routing - but couldn't keep up with 10Mb/second
Ethernet without some help.
And this design has other precedents. Old-timers will remember AIN, the
Advanced Intelligent Network - the effort by the Telco's to put more smarts
into their network starting back in the late 1980's or thereabouts. (Wags at
the time said that it wasn't Advanced, it wasn't particularly Intelligent - and
it certainly wasn't a Network.) AIN kept the old switches as a "data plane"
but added an external system - often nothing more than a Sun workstation was
plentgy - as the "control plane" to do things like re-route 800 numbers based
on time of day.
When you can sell specialized hardware with proprietary software, it's really
tough for competitors to get into the market and you can make large profits.
When the hardware is off-the-shelf from any number of suppliers, and all you're
selling is integration with software working to published specs - you can make
money, but nothing like what you made before. The real difficulty for
companies built to work the old way is that they've generally created business
approaches with cost structures that no longer make any sense. Cisco is right
to try to get in on this hardware shift - it's better to cannibalize your own
products than to let someone else cannibalize them - but it's going to be very,
very tough for them.
-- Jerry
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