During the go-go days of the Internet boom times, those of us toiling away for Silicon Valley’s South Bay telecom equipment vendors would gently rib our neighbors to the North with the motto “San Jose is the steak, San Francisco is the sizzle”.
The slogan was intended to capture that most of the era’s iconic networking and hardware vendors, the firms building the technology foundation of the Internet, were clustered toward San Jose, while software developers, web designers, and PR flacks — those with far more style than us and who built what consumers thought of as the Internet — filled the loft spaces of San Francisco’s SOMA district.
I fondly recalled that old saying as I gazed at Cisco’s newly announced Connected Grid Router 2010 and Connected Grid Switch 2050 on the floor of last week’s Connectivity Week in Santa Clara. Cisco, perhaps the biggest winner of last century’s boom, is angling to be a winner again.
To date, most of the smart grid headlines have gone to venture-backed AMI specialists like Silver Spring Networks, or to those building slick (or I should say “sizzling”) tools for the consumer – think Microsoft Hohm, Google PowerMeter, EnergyHub, iControl, …
