Cisco thinks twice on Norwegian video borg

Cicso is stupid...

They run the numbers, and figure they can aquire x amount of marketshare, and it will pay off in 20 years, so let's do it...

Now, if they had the balls to INVEST $3 BILLION in their own products or price reductions, they wouldn't need to worry about aquiring marketshare, the market would come to them. But of course management abhors the risk factor of actually developing it on their own, whereas an aquisition boils down to simple Excel. And of course an aqusisiton mean payouts to Wall St. firms for underwriting, which means that the Cicso execs get the use of houses on Mystique, corporate jets on loan, and Columbian marching powder from Goldman or whomever. Whereas investing in R&D means getting none of that from your CTO or VP of Product Development, just difficult to understand status reports and in 2 years time some boring demos of the new line that you have to attend...yawn, right?

Have some balls Cisco, don't get taken for a ride, simply beat them by developing better products that the market wants. Or is that too hard for you???

N.B. - I've seen the Tandenberg products, and they are not all that, really...

fools!

fools! sell your shares now to Cisco for that price - otherwise your company and tech will be worth pretty much nothing in a couple of years as an alternative becomes the norm.

'sweeten the deal' = greed. granted, they might have hoped for bigger returns - even in a global downturn...but the asking price for their current market value is on par.

Hello Cisco, Goodbye Tandberg Norway.

As a former Tandberg employee, and one who likes the company, I hope the deal doesn't go through. It would almost definitely mean closing shop in Norway within two years. This is logic, not fear mongering. Cisco already has already developed their own endpoints which for the most part are much nicer and cooler than their Tandberg counterparts. Cisco used to just OEM the Tandberg T150, but they designed phones that look and feel better than Tandbergs now.

Tandberg has conference room systems, but they're obscenely expensive, and while full of cool features, their sales volume is low and Cisco can almost definitely do a better job on their own or they can move the hardware guys from Norway to the states to do it.

The real item of interest to Cisco is the backbone hardware which Tandberg makes. But Tandberg wasn't making anything interesting a while back, so they acquired a British company full of great talent and products that ... also make cool end point systems, cooler than Tandberg Norway's. So in reality, all the products of interest to Cisco are made by the office formally known as Codian. If Cisco paid all that money for just Codian, it would be worth every penny.

Fact is, while Tandberg Norway makes a few interesting end points, they're not that interesting compared to what Codian and Cisco make. The good new of course is that if Tandberg in Norway closes shop, there will be about 350 good to excellent engineers back in the Norwegian market for companies like Trolltech, Opera and others to pick and choose from.