Hello Cisco, Goodbye Tandberg Norway.

As a former Tandberg employee, and one who likes the company, I hope the deal doesn't go through. It would almost definitely mean closing shop in Norway within two years. This is logic, not fear mongering. Cisco already has already developed their own endpoints which for the most part are much nicer and cooler than their Tandberg counterparts. Cisco used to just OEM the Tandberg T150, but they designed phones that look and feel better than Tandbergs now.

Tandberg has conference room systems, but they're obscenely expensive, and while full of cool features, their sales volume is low and Cisco can almost definitely do a better job on their own or they can move the hardware guys from Norway to the states to do it.

The real item of interest to Cisco is the backbone hardware which Tandberg makes. But Tandberg wasn't making anything interesting a while back, so they acquired a British company full of great talent and products that ... also make cool end point systems, cooler than Tandberg Norway's. So in reality, all the products of interest to Cisco are made by the office formally known as Codian. If Cisco paid all that money for just Codian, it would be worth every penny.

Fact is, while Tandberg Norway makes a few interesting end points, they're not that interesting compared to what Codian and Cisco make. The good new of course is that if Tandberg in Norway closes shop, there will be about 350 good to excellent engineers back in the Norwegian market for companies like Trolltech, Opera and others to pick and choose from.

fools!

fools! sell your shares now to Cisco for that price - otherwise your company and tech will be worth pretty much nothing in a couple of years as an alternative becomes the norm.

'sweeten the deal' = greed. granted, they might have hoped for bigger returns - even in a global downturn...but the asking price for their current market value is on par.