At Cisco, I made every decision based on what was good for the company, and that pretty much ruined my marriage and my health.
The stock prices of networking equipment companies like Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks sometimes seem as if they are priced for perpetual success.
With San Cisco, young kids are more willing to yell at whoever is standing on stage. The difference between the yelling and the quietness is if the older crowd are quiet, they're showing you respect. When you do get a cheer back from them, it's special because they are actually listening.
The United States ran the table on Internet innovations, creating companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, and others. Europe and Japan scarcely contributed.
If I were a Chinese dissident, I'd be grateful that Cisco had helped bring the Internet to China, but I'd also be outraged that Cisco may have helped the cops keep me under surveillance and catch me trying to organize protest activities.
Truly original thinkers tend not to be entrepreneurs who've spent 10 years at Cisco and can be trusted to know what they're doing. They tend to be 26 years old and highflying. They often have a very childlike mind, with some naivete.
I want to make activism a bigger part of my life, while hopefully maintaining the opportunity to help out causes that I really care about. And being an actor allows me to do that. Shooting a Cisco commercial allows me to do that. I mean, doing all these things allows me to talk about these issues. But don't think there aren't those moments where I'm like, "What am I doing? I have to quit my job and chain myself to a tree." Believe me, I have those moments.
When I look at the success of the Cisco Networking Academy program, which has reached more than 4.75 million people since 1997, I know it could have never achieved this scale without our partners. Together we provide the tools, equipment and training for our students and teachers.
At Cisco, we are moving to collaboration teams, groups coming together that represent sales, engineering, finance, legal, etc. And we're training leaders to think across silos.
The Cisco announcement that their revenue might slow due to shortage of parts meant, therefore, Nortel was down because it's competing in the same market. I think that was the big negative.
In 2007 WebEx was acquired by Cisco and I became Cisco's Corporate VP of engineering, in charge of collaboration software.
Cisco has been both a pioneer in legitimizing VoIP as an alternative to traditional telephony but also an innovator as it has maintained its competitive lead over the past decade.
If you choose a market that already exists, say, networking equipment, you have to compete with an established company like Cisco. Even if your product is marginally better, Cisco can fudge it and outsell you.
My history was the Western. I grew up with the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Bonanza. I felt as much a child of the West as someone born in Montana or Wyoming.
I think the adoption rate with respect to social media and how companies leverage that varies by the company. Cisco is probably a leader in the space. A lot of times, we actually use virtual ways to communicate our brand and do some of our advertising, first on the social space, then we do on physical advertising.
A vote of confidence from Cisco Systems can be very important to fledging technology companies, especially if they have initial public offerings on the horizon.
Cisco never had a red quarter. Never. Took us three years to get funding, and in those three years, we were never in the red, and that was because we had two products to sell. They were not sexy or cool, but we had enough of a market that we could generate enough of a cash stream to grow the company.
I remember I had an actor friend - a close friend from college - Anthony Zerbe. He sent me a telegram before I started my first movie, 'Cisco Pike.' It said, 'Have a good time. Ignore the camera.' That was the extent of my training.
During the time of Webex growing from $0 to greater than $700M, the company was sold to Cisco. The Webex team lost the passion and drive to further grow the business because many Webex veterans left and Cisco's integration with Webex was not successful.
Our next CEO needs to thrive in a highly dynamic environment, to be capable of accelerating what is working very well for Cisco and disrupting what needs to change.
Cisco has not and does not design products for the purpose of political censorship.
Companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Intel were just starting at their 10-year anniversary.
We [with Cisco Adler] came back to the concept that our music, our lifestyle, and what we stood for was dope. So whoever the show brought to the music, they would stick. It was a way to bring people to the music, and I'm still doing that.
Every company, city, and country is becoming digital, navigating disruptive markets, and Cisco's role in the digital transformation has never been more important.
If you think about Cisco's offerings like TelePresence, where it's an immersive way to communicate for businesses to connect and have conversations in a real-time immersive mode, how that will change health care, how that'll change retail business, how that'll change actually travel. There's lots of changes that we will see going forward.
I long had a goal of becoming president of a company. But it was not till I was 57 years old that I became president of Cisco Systems with its 34 employees. Life offers opportunity at every stage.
As IT enters the mobile-cloud era, IT providers need to be more innovative about addressing customers' fast changing needs. Over the past two years, Cisco and Citrix have collaborated to deliver significant innovation into the market. Now we are excited to accelerate our partnership into cloud, networking and mobility.
I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos.
Our success at Cisco has been defined by how we anticipate, capture, and lead through market transitions. Over the years, I've watched iconic companies disappear - Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Wang, Digital Equipment - as they failed to anticipate where the market was heading.
Cisco has long recognized the importance of national service, both to the corps members and to the community. For example, we partner with educational service organizations like City Year and Teach For America to grow their corps members and reach more students.
I grew up in the age of radio. That was my main boyhood form of entertainment: lying on the living room floor with my ears affixed to the radio. I loved shows like 'The Phantom,' 'Cisco Kid,' and even 'Happy Theater' when I was younger.
At Cisco, we believe everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver. We strive to inspire, connect, and invest in opportunities that accelerate global problem solving by empowering people everywhere to work toward eradicating poverty, unemployment, climate change, and hunger.
Personally, I just got one of these Vonage IP phones. It's actually pretty cool. It comes with one of these Cisco ATA routers where you just plug an analog handset in.
The purity of sound that Cisco Music and Bernie Grundman have achieved with this 45rpm version of Famous Blue Raincoat 20th Anniversary Edition is shockingly perfect. I have never heard any version of Famous Blue Raincoat which sounds better... and I've heard them all. No caveats: This LP set is unbelievably gorgeous. I have been waiting two decades to hear it like this. Cisco's 45rpm edition is simply as good as Famous Blue Raincoat gets.
Cisco presents our biggest challenge in the firewall market for the fact that they have such a large percentage of market share. Displacement of an entrenched incumbent is always a challenge.
People who might normally have to travel hours to a distant city to see a cardiologist can now do so virtually, through Cisco technology, at their local hospital or health clinic. Clinicians use technology to share patient reports and diagnostic images and collaborate on cases.
Almost every move in the market is either a move to align with where Cisco is going or to align to compete against us or to utilize that technology.
Cisco projects that in 2020, now just five years away, there will be seven billion people on the earth and 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. Six-and-a-half devices on average per person. As a father of five young adults and teenagers, I think we are - in my household, we've exceeded the 6.5 number.
Regardless of the technology, we at Cisco believe that there is a need to 'connect the unconnected,' whether it is using 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi. We are working on enabling heterogeneous access across different technologies. The basic need to 'connect to unconnected' still remains.
Social media is an information channel; it's like radio or TV... In Cisco, we made a lot of money on public protocol. I think the social media model replicates that protocol.
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