Back in 1983, the Ethernet market was led by 3Com, Digital Equipment Corp., and possibly Intel. Cisco was still just a gleam in the eyes of Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner. TCP/IP was far from the leading protocol that used Ethernet as its underpinnings. Apple had AppleTalk, DEC had DECnet, Novell had IPX/SPX, 3Com had its own protocol.

You get the picture–networking was a mess. Multiprotocol routers were mostly a theory. Cisco jumped into this void with the promise that it would route just about any protocol that could be routed. Its hardware was robust, it performed well, and Cisco’s engineering team would find a fix to practically any problem its customers had.

IT pros would like that Cisco back.

When we asked 588 IT pros (full report available at reports.informationweek.com next month) what they think about Cisco, and what they think the company needs to do to remain competitive, the top two responses were lower product prices and focus on your roots.
Network Computing