Cisco, EMC, Once Allies Now Frenemies, Have Similar Strategy To Maintain Dominance

Commodification promised to kill old tech stalwarts like Cisco, EMC and Oracle as standardized, mass produced hardware paired with open source software undermined their high-margin businesses. However the road to irrelevance was detoured by an instinctive response: adapt or die. Each company's resulting metamorphosis from peddling boxes to building full stack IT systems has been both predictable and impressive. Predictable in that the old tech response to ankle biting commodity products follows the classic Clayton Christensen disruptive technology playbook: move up the performance and feature axis. But today's old tech response deviates from the economic model by introducing a third axis: services. Cisco and EMC realize that they can't win the price/performance game. Instead, each has concluded that businesses, even tech savvy firms, don't obsess over about speeds and feeds, but business outcomes and competitive advantage. Old tech vendors can't win a price war, but they can win a results war.