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Not really sure what this article's final point is? Facebook and Google have hardware teams that allow them to build impressive data centers. Cisco has lost a l

Not really sure what this article's final point is? Facebook and Google have hardware teams that allow them to build impressive data centers. Cisco has lost a lot of potential revenue from all the components FB and Google have managed to build in-house. Even if you say that's not the same, Samsung is probably the closest to Apple in the consumer space. They own the entire pipeline in various degrees. Yea Apple is winning in profits, but it's not the vertical integration that's doing it.

saagarjha 8y ago
Samsung doesn’t own the OS to the extent that Apple does.
- MBCook 8y ago
  At least not the one people actually want.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Ha, yes. It’s kind of fitting that I forgot about Tizen.
Cyph0n 8y ago
Both FB and Google still buy a ton of equipment from Cisco..
- evgen 8y ago
  Less and less every year. Five years ago the entire DC used third-party networking gear from top to bottom. The top of rack switch was the first thing to go, replaced with an in-house device that could do the job well and that provided flexibility for future plans. Load balancers (there was almost a contest to see who could get to be the ones to take a sledgehammer to those F5 pieces of shit) and cluster switches were next; at that point you had an entire fabric of custom-made kit that would do rack-level BGP. Intra-cluster and gateway switches are the remaining big iron, or at least were when I left, and I am not sure it will ever be worthwhile for Facebook to invest in the hardware necessary for those tasks. Expensive kit for sure, but the spend with third-party networking gear companies dropped by at least an order of magnitude over less than a decade.