Because you’re reading Network World, I don’t have to tell you about Cisco’s market power and penetration in all aspects of the networking. But how did the company get there? Cisco is the pre-eminent practitioner of what I call poster child marketing. It does these things itself, publicizes them massively and gains credibility with big customers that are facing the same problems.
We saw this during the bubble with the e-commerce system that Cisco rolled out. Its ability to increase productivity by taking orders over the Inter