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Last week one of the most respected CEOs in Silicon Valley, John Chambers, admitted that Cisco Systems had lost it’s path (only a true geek would recognize that pun) and was planning to do something about. I figured Cisco would take some time to make those changes and then I could write about it, but John has already started the process by scrapping the Flip camcorder division. The interwebs lit up when it was announced and most of the comments were along the lines of “who couldn’t see that coming.”

As a past employee of Cisco I think John is a stand-up guy and a VERY charismatic speaker. I would joke with people that if John told us to sell cocaine, I would because he was so persuasive. However, as a shareholder of Cisco I think John really needs to clean house and take a hard look at the direction of the company and more importantly look in the mirror.

Since John’s admission, many columns have been written about what ails Cisco. Most articles are going for the low hanging fruit such as get rid of the consumer focused product line and get back to basics with enterprise and service provider customers. But there is a much bigger issue that goes to the heart of Cisco – people.

Executive Departures
John has been around since 1991 and has had the top spot since 1995, he runs a tight ship and probably to tight of a ship. So much so, that I believe many top executives are leaving because he won’t give up the throne.  The list of departing executives include Tony Bates (left for Skype), Sue Bostrom, Judith Estrin, Charles Giancarlo, Kevin Kennedy, Don Listwin, Carl Russo, Jayshree Ullal and Mike Volpi to name a few.

Failed M&A Strategy
Cisco was once hailed for it’s inorganic growth via their M&A (mergers and acquisitions) strategy. That strategy worked early on for Cisco when it acquired companies such as Crescendo (the heart of their LAN switching platform), Kalpana, Grand Junction, StrataCom (WAN switching IGX platform) and Calista (IP phones). Most of these deals took place on Mike Volpi’s watch when he used to run the M&A group. In a Fortune Magazine article back in May 15, 2000 they called Volpi the Cisco M&A wunderkid.  Volpi had a great reputation within Cisco of being super bright and potentially could have led Cisco.

But, over the past 7-8 years that strategy has been a complete disaster with acquisitions such as Scientific Atlanta, Linksys and Pure Digital Technologies (Flip camcorder line). It appears many of the consumer focused acquisitions happened under Ned Hooper, the recent M&A head. It’s easy to say the strategy was completely flawed in hindsight, but Ned took a chance and unfortunately it didn’t work out. However, a lot of money was flushed down the toilet in running this experiment. Little known acquisitions such as Monteray Networks were shut down within a year of signing a $500 million term sheet. Internally, Cisco talked about how quickly they could integrate these new companies into the Cisco machine. Unfortunately, many founders of these companies left just as quickly and started new companies. Such as Dev Gupta who sold two companies to Cisco, Dagaz and MaxComm in 1997 and 1999 respectively.

Cisco Globalization Center East
I get annoyed every time I read an Indian business magazine and Wim Elfrink is talking about how he re-located to India to setup Cisco’s second biggest campus.  It’s a catch-22, is Cisco East something truly revolutionary? If so, then please communicate that better to the world so we can learn. If it’s not revolutionary then get over it, many large technology companies do it all the time – it’s called cost arbitrage.

In summary, John Chambers has one goal and that is to keep his shareholders happy which has not been happening. Cisco was the internet darling in the 90′s and all the way to March 25, 2000. On that day, Cisco became the largest company by market capitalization in the world at USD 579.2 billion, few companies can say that. Since then it’s a different story, if you bought Cisco in April 2001 you should have paid around USD 18.00 a share which is exactly where it is today in April 2011…over those 10 years it hit a low of USD 9.50 and a high of USD 33.00. Compare that to Apple, in April 2001 you would have paid USD 12.00 a share and now it is hovering around USD 330.00…the lure of the consumer market.

Recently a good friend, Sahil, gave a presentation (view via SlideShare) about building a web product company. If you have a startup bone in your body I would highly recommend taking a look at the presentation not only because the information is great but the actual slides are something you don’t often see. Most presenters like to pack 20 bullets into a single slide, use 12 point font, throw in a worthless graphic or a bunch of other things that usually lead people to tune out. One word can summarize his presentation – simplicity.

That got me to think about Apple. Many people would say Apple is about simplicity when you look at their products and design. I would argue it goes one step further – the number of products.  You want a phone from Apple? Great, that is the iPhone end of story. Granted they have various models based on storage but that’s it. Look at Nokia, Samsung or Motorola, I honestly get a f***ing brain hemorrhage when someone mentions their model number of their phone.

Apple follows what German car makers have been doing for decades. Have a basic design and sell it in 3 levels, what I call SML (small, medium and large). You want a Benz sedan? The low end is the C, mid-range is the E and high end is the S class. Within those 3 classes are various models based on engine specs but at least when someone says “I bought an E class” you know the general specs of the car. BMW has 3, 5 and 7. Audi has A4, A6 and A8.  American car makers face the same issue as Nokia and Motorola, confuse the buyer with all sorts of models and then spend massive marketing dollars to “educate them.”

Simplicity is easy to achieve on day one but to maintain that same level of simplicity 10 to 20 years later is almost next to impossible. Companies that can figure it out get compensated and you have to look no further then Apple’s market capitization, not bad for a company that just sells consumer electronics. Simplicity at its best.

Some people say Steve Jobs can see the future and others say he is an amazing marketer. I would agree with the later and it really hit home this past weekend as I was reading a magazine and saw an ad from Dell. Last week Dell launched it’s iPhone killer called the Streak and partnered with Tata-DOCOMO for the 3G launch. It was a full page magazine ad and a paper cut-out of the actual size phone that was attached to the magazine via a string. I will give the Dell marketing team kudo’s for the cut-out so I could compare the Streak to my current phone, but the full page ad in Forbes Magazine was complete techno-speak and I’m sure the target audience just glazed over it.

The list of features on the full page ad were:

• 5″ multi-touch LCD display with Corning Gorilla Glass
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz Processor
• 3G, Wi-Fi
• 5MP cameras
• 1530mAH battery
• 512MB ROM + 512MB RAM + 2GB non-user accessible MicroSD
• 16GB MicroSD card included
• Free upgrade to Android 2.1 post availability

Let me dissect each feature:

• Does anyone really care about Corning Gorilla Glass? Does the glass break easily or not is the question.
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz Processor. 1GHz means nothing to me and most people, is it fast or not.
• 3G, Wi-Fi. Good.
• 5MP cameras – why not spell out megapixel?
• 1530mAH battery – this just made me explode, I really have no context of what this means. Does the battery last a long time or not.
• 512MB ROM + 512MB RAM + 2GB non-user accessible MicroSD. Non-user accessible? then why even tell me
• 16GB MicroSD card included. Good
• Free upgrade to Android 2.1 post availability – I have no idea what 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 means. And a true Android geek would call these releases by their code names such as Eclair (2.0/2.1), Froyo (2.2), Gingerbread (2.3), Honeycomb (3.0), etc…

I can partly understand where the Dell marketing team is coming from, they have always had to compete on technical computer specs.  But, when it comes to the phone they need to have a marketing team that understands that selling a phone is not the same as selling a computer. Which is something that Apple gets whether they are selling a computer, iPhone or iPad.

It appears we are weeks away from private carriers finally launching 3G services in India. The first revolution was voice calls with the launch of mobile networks in India. What really led to mass adoption was a price war that was kicked off by Ambani’s Reliance Communications which led to very low ARPU’s for carriers.

Will data be the next revolution for the mobile carriers? Personally, I think the next revolution will occur if the carriers price their offering at what people currently pay for their voice services. So if the average ARPU is currently Rs. 200 per month, I would expect plans to start at that price.  More importantly they really need to let the bits fly through the networks and offer an unlimited data plan or have a “fair-use” policy that starts at 30GB or so per month.

Yes, that sounds like a pie in the sky wishlist but if they misprice on the initial launch they will loose a lot of pent up demand since everyone is expecting low prices. I don’t expect a carrier like Tata Docomo to throw down the pricing gauntlet. Thankfully, Mukesh Ambani is back in the telecom space after acquiring a 95% stake in Infotel for USD 1 billion dollars.  Infotel has a WiMax license for the entire country and could offer low costs data plans and thus push the prices of 3G services down as well.

The first revolution for voice is still talked about and I hope it continues with data or the Indian mobile market will end up being a one hit wonder.

With all this technology the one thing that remains elusive to me is a comprehensive life organizer. I’ve been searching for something to organize my life since the days of Borlands’ Sidekick and Lotus Organizer, it’s like searching for the holy grail. I go through cycles when searching for the ultimate organizer, every time I start the hunt I think of U2′s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The recent search included Things for the Mac, The Hit List and OmniFocus. I bought Things for the Mac and thought it was great but after entering all my data in it and I started to use it, I realized it wasn’t for me.

However, I think I have found the holy grail for me and it’s called Evernote. I used Evernote back in March 2008 when it launched and felt it just didn’t fit into my workflow. However, over the past 3-4 months I have realized how awesome it is and just captures everything in life and let’s me file it away.

My big issue was I needed a to-do list and a way to capture notes from life.  I tried using Things and it worked perfectly for the to-do list part but the notes part just didn’t work for me.  Recently, I also noticed that I had over 50-60 articles that were bookmarked in Safari and no real way to access that information.

Enter Evernote. It handles to-do lists and I can create notes and search them like I’m the next Google.  The most impressive feature is something called “web clipper” that allows you to take any content from the web and save it to Evernote, then it magically syncs all the data between your laptop, iPhone and iPad.

It really has become my new brain – what is the voltage of the CFL lights in the bathroom, what are the movies I want to watch, what are the books I want to read, how to make a great sangria (yeah I “web clipped” that article from lifehacker)…it’s all in Evernote and available on my MacBook Pro or iPhone.

The reason I love Evernote is because it fits into my work flow and I don’t have to think about using it…it just comes natural.  I will admit, I use a combination of regular paper and Evernote.  I use scrap paper for all my short-term to-do lists (1-2 days) and everything else I throw into Evernote.

They have a great freemium model so you can check out most of the features without dropping a dime until you are ready for the premium features. You can read more about their freemium business model here.

UPDATE: Several people have emailed me saying they love Evernote as well and gave me a couple of additional tips.
- scan documents into Evernote (it’s OCR capability is great)
- add images to documents