Is Marc Andreessen betting $300M against Cisco's successful acquisition model?

Who's going to win, Internet Explorer, or Netscape? Yeah, Marc is way successful, better bet on his side.

Who cares? Post something relevant, you hack. Of course startups can out-innovate, but you look at the products they produce. The challenge is making Enterprises adopt the technology of a startup, which rarely happens. It takes a Sun, or an IBM, or your favorite whipping company to make a technology scalable to operate on a world-wide network for thousands of users. it takes lots of money, lots a brain trust, and Cisco's got it. Talk to any Cisco employee, they are passionate and capable in their area of expertise, Cisco's not missing anything, and is certainly not coming off the top of the mountain any time soon.

Trust the Netscape guy? Yup, he innovated and got 0wned.

His whole idea is to watch what get's acquired and fund another company. Umm, ok, that makes a whole bunch of sense. Why not look to see who has the good tech now and invest in them, so when they get acquired the investment company can reap the rewards. Or that would take too much effort.

"independent companies operating in Silicon Valley able to out innovate Cisco simply because they have no desire to be acquired." <--- This has always been the case. But the lack the funding to innovate, the skill sets to grow and maintain the product. People don't buy point products for networking/security/unified comms. They buy solutions. Point product vendors or "niche players" quite often don't offer solutions, but rather a fancy product that has some special bells n' whistles.

Internet Explorer is loosing market share. Agreed. It is also a free browser included in the OS which has been known to be insecure. With the uptake in Mac OS, Linux, IE will continue to loose share. What does that have to do with former co-founder from Netscape betting against Cisco's acquisition ?

"oh well, it's a fact that Cisco is losing market share across the board under Warrior's vision."
Brad, you actually use yourself as a reference?
Also, it's not a "fact" because Dell'Oro group reported a survey. It's a survey! I work for Cisco and I know 2/4 products I work with have gained market share, 1 is flat, 1 is -8% likely due to the economy.

This sounds eerily silimiar to the artcile you posted about Shoretel winning a baseball park in the USA as a big deal. Yet Cisco getting named to AT&T's short list of preferred vendors (Juniper, Huawei were not) was barely mentioned.

Steve

I am not impressed by Andreessen. He is a master at hype, sound bites and simple analysis, but I have not seen or heard anything really smart or good ideas from him since Mosaic. I imagine that his current portfolio is not delivering the big returns that he had hoped. Sure, Ning is huge, but how much advertising can he sell to make it really profitable. Twitter and the other new technology companies either have no clue how to make money yet or are not that interesting.

While I agree with the basic premise that startups will out innovate big companies, I do not agree that they will necessarily make the big returns. In fact, they need each other, most startups either go out of business or are bought by the big guys like Cisco. Few do, or should go public. What Andreessen, neglects to mention, is that his fund, or any venture fund for that matter, would not be as viable without companies like Cisco who provide the capital for the "liquidity event".

Cisco's model of owning the network products channel and filling it up with acquired products is obsolete. The company had for last 2 decades relied on direction from their channel to enter into adjacent markets. The channels are now oblivious as to what the next adjacent market is.

The company needs to use its $30B to fund new projects and create a culture of innovation.