Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) Ascend stock (fwd)

At 10:47 PM 11/6/97 -0800, MegaZone wrote:
>This is just MZ talking, not a Livingston rep at the moment...
>
>I picked that because it has been a major sales point.  3Com/USR has lost
>out because of no OSPF.  The larger the customer, the more important it
>is to them - seems to be the relationship.

Hmmm. From what I see, the larger the customer the less likely they will
use OSPF on the NAS. This is true not only at Ascend shops, but also at
Cisco and Shiva shops. But every shop is different.

>I've looked at most of the products in this class.  I just don't see the
>base architecture of the TNT expanding as some of the others.  If you 
>change the core - which I've been told by some Ascend folks is in the
>works - then sure.

One thing that should be quite obvious to anyone in this field is that
product life cycles are very short. Each vendor must be actively working on
the next generation as soon as the current generation is released. Or
sooner! There are and will always be incremental and forklift product
upgrades for all of our major products. The same goes for any vendor.

>Will it still be the same base chassis in a year - or will it be TNT mkII?

Use your imagination. Same as I'll do for Lucent.

>I think that is an issue.  It isn't possible to please everyone all the 
>time.  No company has done it.  So you need to decide how broad a base you
>want to aim for.  90%  95%  At some point returns drop off.  Don't chase
>the feature of the week.  Every time an editorial gets published someone
>invariably RFEs that new feature.  And 99% of the time it is dead and never
>goes anywhere.  Some companines try to do it all though.  

We can't afford to add a feature that isn't desperately needed by multiple
customers. We simply won't waste time on a dead feature. 99% of the
features we have added are in heavy use by our customers.

>Releasing 5 products in a rush and then struggling to correct them all
>simultaneously.  Or releasing solid products one by one, and building the
>line in regular intervals?  I think that is teh different in philosophy.
>Ascend seems axious to be first to marker.  Livingston isn't, and would
>rather be later to market but with a more robust offering out the door.

That isn't happening here. The Core Switching releases are not related to
the Max/TNT releases and their code is extremely stable. The GRF was a new
product that has taken a year to get to the stable point that it enjoys
today. But that also isn't related to the Max/TNT. These are different
engineering groups that handle these products. At the same time, they have
been very successful at being first to market by a very long way. Our
support of MPLS is many, many months ahead of the competition and yes, it
works very well.

Most of the issues on this list are Max/TNT related and that is where we
have admittedly had reliability problems. This is where the growth of the
company is most noticed. We have set new policies in place to accommodate
our new status, but these things take a bit of time. If the market wasn't
so rushed to get new features like 56K modems, we wouldn't be talking about
this. But that's the case. You'll be hearing more about a new controlled
software release process and other enhancements in due time.

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