was thinking about this because i was thinking about cisco phones or rather that there never were any cisco phones
everyone knows cisco phones. they're these ones. you've seen them in every bank you've ever been in. they are Telephones. the screen is unimportant. you pick up the handset and dial a number. perhaps you press 9 
these are IP phones - they connect with Ethernet, not phone lines. commonplace now but it took like 15 years to get this way, and i was shocked when I learned how old these are - they're from 1998.
it's kinda wild to me to imagine people using VoIP in 1998. like, sure, businesses had networks, but... I mean, hubs were still being purchased. it always seemed impossible to me that anyone would have had the infra to run these. But they did, and they were phenomenally popular
I could be wrong about this but I think these scooped the rest of the voip world by like a decade. I never saw anything but Cisco phones or non-VoIP phones anywhere until the late 2000s at least.
but what's funny about this is that, as distinctive as these phones were, there was a chance they never would have been recognizeable at all. they could have looked like this.
utterly drab, utterly unmemorable. your brain would refuse to store the image. it would slide off of it like falling off a log.
and the reason for this is of course that these weren't made by cisco, they were made by Selsius, who of course is the company they bought that really made it, and almost certainly is the real company behind most of the immense legacy of "Cisco" VoIP
my enduring conviction is that acquisitions are completely fake. everything I've personally seen and everything everyone has told me confirms this. the reality is probably that "Cisco" in no way made any of this.
the phones, their flagship PBX system Call Manager - probably all made by Selsius Systems, a clearly distinct business with its own entire management and decisionmaking structure and completely separate financials
I bet you anything that from every perspective that matters, in every way but on paper, Cisco did not make any of this, they simply lassoed this company, made them use their name, and absorbed their profits.
And of course I can't really know any of this, not unless I happened to meet an ex-Selsius employee, but I feel safe assuming that the entire customer / support experience for these products would have been totally different if they weren't owned by the dinosaur king of big iron
cisco is a company that primarily sells utterly unsexy steel boxes because they are the Default. that means they've always been happy to just refuse to do anything that might be at all, remotely, in any way, nice to anyone
you want a manual? you want a 1.2MB firmware file for a phone you got off ebay? pay for a support contract you fucking scum. that's the cisco way.
cisco has never made any products
I tell people this all the time: hypercorps rarely have any products. they maybe had one, 20 years ago, but 99% of what you know from them was another companys product that they put their name on and took credit for
oh sure, sure, they "bought" it - except none of the workers got anything out of that purchase, just the execs. so they stole it. like, if you believe in "business" at all - which, hey, let's just pretend we do for a moment - they stole the workers reputations
That's what corps do. They watch and watch and whenever they see someone make something interesting, they go to that person's boss, give them two mil to fuck off, and take the work. The person who made the thing rarely benefits in any way, and the product rarely improves.
It's never beneficial to the *public* when a company gets acquired. The only thing that ever happens is that the product they made continues under a new name, utterly unchanged, or it stops existing sooner than it would have.
Cisco made a router in the 80s. Other than that, every other product you know of from them is someone elses invention, someone else did most of the work. It's not in any way identifiably a "Cisco" product except for a badge.
ding
most of adobe's products are acquisitions. tons of microsoft products. easily 3/4 of Dell's products. I know people who work at the companies Dell bought - they're still the original companies. they just have to say "dell" now
most of adobe's products are acquisitions. tons of microsoft products. easily 3/4 of Dell's products. I know people who work at the companies Dell bought - they're still the original companies. they just have to say "dell" now
yep there it is. they never even bother finishing the renaming
notably, if they had, the filenames would have all started with CIS, which checks out. Cisco is the most cis
