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0 pointsdavidu15y ago0 comments

Strong Disagree. Great products often have to come out of small teams and companies. Often times it's even former employees who create those comapnies and are re-acquired!

This is why Cisco acquires companies started by former Cisco employees on a regular basis that some folks have been acquired into Cisco 3 or 4 times in their careers!

Also, the competitive intelligence is not as useful as it may seem. Data for the sake of data isn't valuable. And when you figure out what they could turn it into, it doesn't seem like it would show much more than economic and market forces already show, even if CK got to scale.

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dotBen15y ago

Yeah that wasn't the point I was making - of course innovation rarely comes from big companies.

My observation was just if you are a $600m/year web serving infrastructure company than a core competency should be monitoring. And thus if a two year old scrappy startup can build out better monitoring, what on earth have RackSpace been building and relying on for the past 12 years?

On the competitive intelligence I think it's insanely useful for RackSpace. Down to shit like being able to monitor up-stream connectivity and routing of other providers and then being able to cross-sell their own proposition knowing the weak points of the current 3rd party solution.

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