When I received the first invitations to Cisco’s product announcement that will “forever change the Internet”, I knew it would be another case of overpromising and underdelivering. But even being prepared for the let down, I was totally disappointed when the “magic” product was another high-end router. No doubt it’s an important product, no doubt it will give the Tier-1 service providers a tenfold improvement of the total network throughput, no doubt it’s a wonderful piece of engineering (quoting the Cisco’s press release: it unifies the combined power of six chips to work as one ... you see how banal and degrading the engineering efforts look when described by marketing?), but it will “forever change the Internet” in the same way that AGS+, Cisco 7000, Cisco 7500, Cisco 12000 and CRS-1 did ... by providing ever-higher core network throughput.

It’s about time Cisco’s marketing “wizards” wake up from their self-induced Web 2.0 stupor and stop ruining Cisco’s hard-won reputation that it got through 25+ years of building, delivering and supporting great products and solutions. It’s also time to realize that the routers stopped being sexy over 15 years ago and that they’re no more exciting to 99.999% of the population than a paper mill. They’re still incredibly complex feats of engineering, but that never incited the viral crowds the marketing “gurus” at Cisco are obviously trying (and failing) to target; these crowds are way more impressed by a back-flipping cat than a high-end router.