Jean-Bernard Lévy shakes his head. He has a different slant on the issue. “We have had Matra engineers working on inter-networking equipment. The basic principles are well understood. Yet we cannot seem to replicate the performance of Cisco’s multi-protocol network routers.” “Are there key patents?” I ask. “There are patents, but they aren’t the crucial thing,” he replies. “The heart of the Cisco router is firmware—software burned into read-only memory or implemented in programmable arrays. Cisco’s product embodies, perhaps, one hundred thousand lines of code that is very skillfully written.
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