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If the Shoe Fits: What Would You Do?

by Miki Saxon

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mCisco CEO John Chambers constantly amazes me.

It’s not his 19 years of reinventing Cisco and keeping it on top, but for other stuff, such as Cisco’s disaster-focused Tactical Operations team.

They just did another very neat thing.

Read the article for the full story, but here’s the short version.

Connectify is a successful startup.

It makes a networking product called Connectify Hotspot that lets you turn any Windows computer into a Wi-Fi hotspot to share your internet connection. It’s been downloaded 65 million times and used for over 500 million hotspots.

Cisco is the world’s largest maker of hotspot equipment.

Connectify had been trying to buy the connectify.com domain since its founding (long story; read article).

Turned out that Cisco had acquired the domain as part of a long ago deal.

When the story came to light Cisco’s reaction was swift.

It immediately turned the domain over to Connectify at no cost.

Connectify publicly expressed its thanks.

Connectify’s CEO Alex Gizis was so thrilled that he wrote a public thank you post to Cisco and called Cisco the “hero” of the story. He then offered a free year of its hotspot service to all of Cisco’s 75,000 employees.

Here’s the question.

Under similar circumstances—hot startup/competing technology—how many of the CEOs at Google, Oracle, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, GE, 3M, HP, VMware, etc. would do the same thing?

What would you do?

Image credit: HikingArtist

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