Judging by the reaction of the 3Com users interviewed after the company’s surprise announcement to drop its large LAN/WAN switches (see 3Com Users Migrate to Extreme — Or Do They?), including its CoreBuilder line, there’s a fair bit of hostility towards 3Com right now. That hostility is perfectly understandable. When 3Com axed the CoreBuilder line, it did so without any apparent advance warning to users, some of whom had just invested in CoreBuilder equipment earlier in the year. Now such users are stuck with switches that have no apparent future and no future service guarantees from 3Com – not a nice situation to be stuck in for any network manager.