Another VC blog that I am a big fan of is Jeff Nolan's (I also happen to like his sense of humor - on the title Jeff has "In the tradition of Dan Rather... Fake, but Accurate!").
Jeff has a couple of great posts on the Vortex 2004 Conference that he attended. It was an event that provided great insights into the future of the enterprise and the IT industry. He posted some very interesting Q&A sessions, including one with Mike Volpi, SVP, Routing Technology for Cisco and previously Cisco's M&A czar. Read it all here in Jeff's post. On the exchange, I found the following replies quite interesting:
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Q: Who are other gorillas that Cisco wants to align with? A: Platforms do exist but they are tectonic in that they move in their own direction irrespective of what their partners want. Some of the gorillas are technology providers while others are services. [Ed. note - he answered this without answering it] Q: Is Microsoft a competitor? A: Not in routers, but they do want to keep the network as a commodity with little value add. It's like having a car with all kinds of fancy technology but still on crummy roads. |
Keep in mind the disclaimer that Jeff had in his blog (comments were paraphrased and not made "ad literem"). But there are a lot more interesting speeches - Geoffrey Moore, Jonathan Schwartz, Shane Robison, among others.
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