[c-nsp] SFP & GBIC module compatibility

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Thu, 28 Dec 2006, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> refused to warrantee a cars if you bought industry standard parts for it
> from someone other than them (at extreme markup)? How far do you think the
> sales people would get if they called your used car "grey market"? Every

This is already being done in the car market. The EU outlawed it though, 
so they cannot end warranty just because you serviced the car at an 
unauthorized garage.

On the other hand, a GPS map of Europe from Audi costs around $500 or so, 
the same map from Tomtom (incompatible with Audi of course) costs $100. 
They both come from the same map company and probably costs the same for 
Adui and Tomtom. THe fact that the Audi factory unit only runs Audi GPS 
navi disks enable them to have the same kind of markup that cisco has.

So this is not a problem of our industry alone. Otoh you can put a tomtom 
naivgation unit into your audi, but it's harder to do the same for us.

> time someone pays Cisco $500 for a $10 GBIC, $900 for a $50 compact flash
> card, or $5000 for a $100 piece of RAM because it has a Cisco label, we
> all lose as consumers.

This has been going on for a long time, there are horroy stories about 
mainframes that to do a memory upgrade on, you flipped a switch in it. The 
memory was always there, you just didnt pay for it (yet). We have the same 
thing with software also, same software does different things depending on 
license. There it might be more justified though.

I'm still glad the vendors didnt try to get the same markup on 10GE 
optics, then we would never have seen any wide adoption of that 
technology. Otoh they might be trying to do the same thing MS and Sony do 
with their Xbox 360 and PS3, getting the technology out the door and make 
up the huge profits later.

That's also one thing that annoys me, on the highend platfors the price 
per bit/s of the interface rarely goes down. We get more features for the 
same price, but there is no "less features" interface at a lower price to 
replace the old "less features" card. See Engine 4+ vs Engine 5 on GSR for 
instance. Same with Engine 2 and 3. Also, the price of a OC192 port is 
3-4 times that of an OC48 port, and this many years later. Looking at the 
computer market this isn't nearly so. So perhaps we should compare 
ourselves more to the Auto market instead of any other market, because the 
industry seems to have quite a few things in similar...

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se