Cisco Closes Linksys Name Down
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, recently announced to members of the European press that the company expects to phase out the Linksys name. Chambers considered the Linksys brand as having reached “end of life,” and is to be replaced by new products that wear a redesigned Cisco emblem.
“‘It will all come overtime into a Cisco brand,’ Chambers said. ‘The reason we kept Linksys' brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there's very little advantage in that.’”
Here’s a little history lesson on Linksys. It was established as a separate company in 1988. By 1999, it had evolved from a basic Ethernet equipment company to one that specialized in routers. Linksys’ most famous router is likely to be the open-source WRT54G. As Linksys grew, it started to attract more and more attention. Cisco decided to grab the company in 2003.
