3Com

» see 3com.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

3com was on every pc i opened in the late 90s. anyway, the etherlink iii in its blue-and-grey isa retail box was the network card you bought when a new windows install needed a network connection and the motherboard had not yet started shipping with one onboard. for me that meant a stack of pulled-out cards on a desk in ankara, isa first then pci later, with the small 3com chip and the bnc-or-rj45 backplane that you picked depending on whether your apartment was already wired with cat5 or still on a thinnet daisy chain. honestly, this is the company my computer-engineering coursework took for granted.

robert metcalfe left xerox parc in 1979, where he had co-invented ethernet with david boggs and chuck thacker, and started 3com in santa clara on june 4 of that year. the name stood for computer communication compatibility. for the first decade the company built a niche around selling ethernet adapters for the ibm pc and its clones, plus the early lan software stacks that let those machines share files. the etherlink series from 1982 onwards was the first commercially successful ethernet nic for the pc and the product that put 3com on the map. anyway, by the late 80s the company was running profitably and had moved its headquarters to marlborough massachusetts.

the etherlink iii in 1992 was the canonical product of the 3com years. the 3c509 isa card and the 3c905 pci card that followed sat in tens of millions of pcs through the 90s, including the corporate beige towers that every office worker had on their desk. 3com also bought u.s. robotics in june 1997 for $6.6 billion, which brought along the palm pilot business as the prize inside the modem-and-handheld bundle. honestly, the palm spinoff into a separate company in march 2000 was the high-water mark of that side of the business, with 3com keeping a chunk of the equity through the ipo.

the 2000s were the long decline. cisco won the enterprise switching and routing market with a focused product line and a sales force that 3com could not match. the consumer modem business that came from u.s. robotics shrank as broadband replaced dial-up. the company tried a joint venture with huawei in 2003 called h3c that gave it china exposure, then bought huawei out of the jv in 2007 for $882 million. the failed bain capital and huawei attempt to acquire 3com itself in 2008 ran into cfius national-security objections and collapsed. hp picked up the pieces and announced the $2.7 billion acquisition on november 11 2009. the deal closed on april 12 2010, the 3com brand was folded into hp networking, and by 2013 the brand was gone for new product names entirely.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

this happened more in the corporate america i was reading about than the ankara i lived in. ethernet itself was the canonical idea metcalfe brought out of parc, and 3com was the company set up to commercialize it as a standard rather than a single-vendor stack. anyway, for the entire 1980s the ethernet protocol was 3com versus the proprietary stacks from ibm token ring plus the proprietary lan tech from novell on the software side. by the early 90s ethernet had won and 3com was the brand on most of the cards that ran it.

back then. the etherlink iii series shipped at a price point a small office could afford and a quality level that survived the transition from ten megabit to one hundred megabit without any user noticing. that was the product that paid for everything else 3com tried in the next decade.

~ the decline ~

cisco was the operational story. while 3com built nics for the desktop, cisco built switches plus routers for the wiring closet, and the wiring closet was where the high-margin business was. by the late 90s every fortune 500 it manager bought cisco switches by default and 3com had to compete on price for the second-tier accounts. the u.s. robotics merger was supposed to fix this with a broader portfolio and it broadly did not. honestly, the palm pilot was the only piece of u.s. robotics that turned out to be valuable, and palm was spun off as a separate company by 2000.

the corebuilder enterprise switches were technically real products, but the support story was inconsistent across the merged sales force from u.s. robotics and the older 3com network engineers. anyway, by 2001 the company was laying off staff in waves and refocusing on the smb tier. the h3c joint venture with huawei in 2003 was where the actual enterprise switch volume came from for the rest of the decade, which is why the 2008 huawei-bain bid was a strategic move for huawei to bring its own equipment into the us under a 3com brand. cfius killed the deal and hp inherited the carcass for a discount.

~ what got buried with it ~

the engineering survived, the brand did not. hp networking kept the h3c switches as its enterprise line under the hp branding, then split the company in 2015 with the networking pieces going to hewlett packard enterprise. the aruba networks acquisition in 2015 became the new home for the network-equipment portfolio, and the 3com pieces were absorbed quietly without a separate product line. the 3com palm spin-off from 2000 had already gone its own way and died as palm inc by 2010.

what got buried with the brand was the engineering culture that built standards-first networking hardware. metcalfe himself had left 3com in 1990 and went on to become a venture investor plus the dean of engineering at the university of texas in 2010. honestly, every ethernet jack on every desk in 2026 still runs the protocol he commercialized from his parc memo, even if nobody remembers the company that shipped the first card.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »