> Cisco is a sales driven company not an engineering company. > Barring a few business units (and that too I'm being generous) > there is absolutely no innovation or drive > to build new products.

this is _exactly_ right. for example, nick-feamster (formerly gatech, and now at princeton) hosted a google hangout with nick-mckeown (stanford) as part of his sdn mooc on coursera. the hangout video is approx. an hour long, and is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abXezfJsqso

initial 15-20 minutes of this video describes the experience of these n/w researchers (mckeown, cassado etc) when they presented their (sdn) idea to execs at csco, their (exec's) rejection of the said idea, which indicating to them (the researchers) that it (the idea) passed the so called 'idea-smell-test' :)

if you have time to spare, watch it !

What is wrong with your punctuation?

Some people speak with a lot of parentheticals.

We don't need speech to be a monoculture for people to understand one another.

Nothing wrong with the parentheses, I find myself doing that a lot as well. The issue is that the majority of the parenthetical statements are not useful information and not necessary to the point they are trying to make. That compared with seemingly nonsensical abbreviation and overall lack of coherent punctuation makes it an experience to read.

I don't see how disliking that poster's writing style translates into advocacy for a speech "monoculture."

I read the comment above as disapproving of the all of the parentheses in the gp post.

If you remove the posts from people who write that way from the total we are closer to a monoculture.

The difference between having one fewer way of writing and literally having one way of writing is the size of the rhetorical exaggeration in my comment

She might be a dyslexic, twelve year old whose first language is not English, has only one hand and is using a mobile.

On the other hand....

Perhaps s/he is on mobile.

"they"

Lisper?

Also, see the reactions from companies with big datacenters who have had to internally evolve off Big Netgear in a similar fashion to moving off Big Iron years before:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/12/networking-the-last... http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-networks...

Out of curiosity, what do the acronyms "sdn" and "n/w" stand for?

Software defined networking, and likely just network(ing) I guess?