Farnum says if you were owned by a crappy switch vendor you would want to go bump at night too

Michael Farnum, my friend from down Texas way, gives us his take on the Tipping Point - Brian Smith remarks about pursuing a bump in the wire approach to network security. Long and short of it is Michael feels somewhat responsible for the way he answered a customer response survey about if he would buy a Tipping Point blade on a 3Com switch.  Basically, Michael makes no excuse that he thinks 3Com switches for the enterprise suck and that he is not alone.  He would consider a Tipping Point blade on another company switch, just not 3Com.

I suspect that this is actually the Tipping Point guys point of view.  The ones I have spoken to are almost ashamed to be affiliated with 3Com and begrudgingly accept the 3Com name on their business cards, but call themselves Tipping Point still.  I say they weren't so proud and arrogant when they were taking the 400+ million dollars from 3Com were they.  Hey as far as I am concerned, the Tipping Point made a bargain and got paid for it too.  Now they have to live with it.  How is it in the best interests of 3Com to tolerate this.  Yeah, it may be short term positive for Tipping Point to disassociate themselves from 3Com, but long term it kills 3Com to not have a coherent, unified company.  If they can't leverage switch business with the Tipping Point stuff, they should just spin Tipping Point off now (don't laugh, I have heard rumors to that effect, but I suspect it is just wishful thinking by Tipping Point guys) and take the money and run.  I wonder if the tail is wagging the dog over there.