When I joined Cisco in 1996, I was sitting in new-hire orientation and distinctly remember one of the VPs tell us that, «we are a software company». I remember being surprised at this, because we had just finished touring an incredible lab filled with huge boxes of blinking lights. But after working with the products for a few months, it became obvious that the value to our customers was the stability and flexibility of the IOS software (no kids, not the stuff on your iPhone).