Re: I nearly choked on my coffee here

While I agree with you on the nature of the businesses (Cisco do R&D heavy, high touch sales/support, fat margins...) versus Dell (commodity items with little R&D, price-driven sales and low margins), high-end switching is becoming a commodity market place and it is hurting Cisco.

Combined with the drive towards cloud computing (i.e. the big orders are coming from the cloud providers as the cloud providers win business from Cisco's traditional enterprise markets), Cisco have to be able to compete with Juniper/Brocade rather than worry about printer ink manufacturers who may never actually become a serious threat.

So, do Cisco try and pretend that they can offer high-end switching products at 2-3x the price of competitors while offering less performance or do they buy in a company that knows how to do commodity products and start joining the commodity pricing model for hardware and leverage their software features/support to provide the value?

Plus Linksys+Dell makes more sense than selling Linksys for a loss...