Here is an interesting tidbit I got from Tribe in my email this morning.

“… we (Tribe) sold the software to Cisco and most of the engineering team went along with the deal to reduce overhead.”

Tribe is a social network similar like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and the fresh rising star called Virb.

To me, Cisco’s strategy becomes more and more obscure, or ominous at best. Okay, I got that they want to enter consumer market with a VOIP concept. I also understand that they are attempting to spread into a wider base of markets, broadening their footprint, so they are not solely dependent on networks and network hardware. But what has a social network like Tribe got to do with it?

Of course it’s never easy to tell from the outside about a company’s motivation. Any strategic moves may not make sense if you don’t know the big picture. On the other hand, if you see a row of strategic moves falling in place, you usually get closer to the picture with every stroke. In this regard, the acquisition of Tribe.net doesn’t really make sense to me.

It looks more like a “we can buy you too”-kind of thing, to mimic Google and Yahoo and still be in the buzz of the industry. As Cisco undoubtly realized at some point, in comparison to Yahoo and Google they are aging. After the rather embarrassing iPhone trial with Apple they need good press. Tribe was Web 2.0 before the term even existed. Maybe this is an act to rejuvenite Cisco from the inside, to demonstrate to themselves that they are up to the game with the big boys playing in the Web 2.0 field.