Cisco HAUNTED by $655m memory components snag Cisco has swallowed huge costs to attempt to firefight heavily degraded memory components found in the company's kit - but it's refusing to bad-mouth the supplier behind the tetchy chips. It said that customers and biz partners, whose products are largely out of warranty, would be supported by Cisco after it decided to switch …
Hang on, seems like you guys missed out the real fun in this story
Q: How and when did Cisco find out about this issue?
A: Cisco first became aware of this issue in December 2010.
And later:
Only in late 2012 did field failures and supplier review data point to a potential customer impact
So it took an engineering company 2 years to figure out it was bad memory, and the same time frame to admit to customers they were exploring an issue (They denied all knowledge until this PR stunt was ready to be pushed out the door).
I dont know about you, but that seems like a very long time, a significant portion of the shelf life of most of these products.
I imagine it could take that long to determine the cause of the problem - physically failing memory is a odd failure case (and very rare I would have thought), and would certainly be right down on the list of things to check. After software and all the rest of the HW. And it would be a bastard to debug.
Would be good if .... other companies accepted that the expected life of electronics kit is more than the 3 years accounting depreciation period.
EXAMPLE : about time Apple got in front of the high failure rate of the 2011 MacBookPro 15' Integrated graphics chip failures that kill motherboards.
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