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- On the Cisco / Brock Lesnar Analogy
On the Cisco / Brock Lesnar Analogy
So a fellow infosec buddy of mine, Hoff, wrote a great piece about how Brock Lesnar is like Cisco. His main points seemed to be that 1) Cisco/Brock is really good in an area other than infosec/mma, and 2) people are mistakenly dismissing them because of this.
Those are solid points, and I agree with his analysis, i.e. they’re foolish to underestimate them–but I have another angle which is where I thought Hoff was going with the analogy when I first saw the title.
To me the more interesting observation is that “when skill levels are close to equal, size and strength matter. A lot.
So when Brock fights most people it’s almost like an adult fighting a young teenager. It’s almost unfair to the point of brutality. Sure, the teenager can win, but the skill difference between him and Brock would have to be extraordinary. And the better Brock gets the lower the chances anyone can be that much better than him.
It’s the same with Cisco. They’re already in your network. They have the routers, they have the switches, they have the VPNs. That’s the size/power difference between them and $foobrand. It’s true that many companies have some functionality (technique) that Cisco doesn’t have, but Cisco is good at being good at things. They can buy a gym and pay someone else to work out for them.
In the end, the Brocks and Ciscos of the world will crush the competition. Not because the competition can’t win any given battle, but because the more times they fight, and the more time the big guys get to train, the less difference there will be in technique and functionality.
And at that point it’ll just be a man against a boy. ::