Earlier this year, Cisco finally did away with the Linksys brand name on their home wireless networking gear (they had acquired Linksys all the way back in 2003). They added some swoopy industrial design, redid the configuration UI to be “easier”, renamed the product the “Cisco Valet”, and jacked up the price of a basic home wireless router from about $75 to $129.
My blog-buddy “Going Like Sixty” found himself of a new router the other day and bought one on the premise that it would be very simple to set up, but, as he tells us here, any visions of “breezing through the simple screens” quickly disappeared into that sucking morass known as “Bangalore Tech Support Madness”. He’s a little bitter about the whole thing.
Frankly, I’m having a hard time imagining why the marketeering geniuses at Cisco thought setting up a wireless router needed to be “easier”, since wireless routers have been probably the simplest bit of home computer tech ever created. In fact, they have been, to some degree, TOO easy because it has always been possible to just plug one in and have it work with very little intervention required, with the result being tons of home wireless networks being set up with nobody ever changing the default admin passwords or implementing the built-in (and equally simple-to-enable) encryption. And now most people don’t even need to bother with their own wireless router, since the cable companies wised up and built them right into their cable modems. Jacking the price and alienating the technically-disinclined doesn’t really seem like a great business plan…but, then again, we are talking about Cisco.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
