"Proprietary" Appliances Are Done

Per George Ou's posting (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=174), Cisco has joined the 21st century and will now support standard USB and memory in the form of compact flash. Amen to that. Any vendor that thinks they can get away with gouging customers with 10-50x the price of open market memory or disk is delusional.

Why? Customers are on to the game. They understand that it's more efficient for vendors to use standard builds for most security equipment nowadays. Unless there are specific proprietary chips, odds are the box is pretty much a standard computer that uses standard piece parts. And those with proprietary stuff better sell a lot of boxes because it's hard to get economies of scale with 1000 units compared to Intel, who sells hundreds of millions.

I've learned this hard way. I once ran a program to upgrade installed base appliances. We were running a "special" that would provide an upgrade for $2000 to go from 500 MB to 1 GB of memory on the appliance. Suffice it to say, that promotion went over like a LEAD BALLOON and customers were pissed. So we ended up having to backpedal and give away the memory upgrade. It certainly wasn't the best promotion I've ever run.

So, it's good to see Cisco reading the writing on the wall, and customers out there - do not stand for this crap. You have a ton of choices and if a vendor is trying to stick it to you, threaten to go elsewhere. The vendors will always try to push these outrageous "upgrades" because a portion of their customer base will bite at full price. Don't you be one of them.