In the last few weeks, Cabletron, Lucent and 3Com have split themselves up, hiving off anything to do with enterprise networks and shifting their focus to other areas they think are growing faster. At first sight it is incredible. And like so many other incredible things, it has its roots in the stock market. Firms dealing with service providers and carriers are seen as exciting 'Internet' stocks with growth potential, while those serving the enterprise are just too dull to bother with. So network suppliers are being literally torn apart by their duties to investors, who look at them and see a potential dot-com darling stifled by a dogged dullard, dutifully dealing with real customers.
Reality can never be as exciting as potential.
This is the phenomenon known as financial engineering. Now, there may be some logic to this. Service provider networks really are growing and they clearly are going to grow in future. Perhaps service providers really are on to such a big thing that it makes sense for suppliers to abandon customers. We come back to the argument of how far service providers can take over responsibility for corporate IT, including networks.