An addition to the list of web giants: Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, and, um, Cisco. The network equipment maker, best known for the routers that direct internet traffic, is to take over Webex for $3.2bn. It's the biggest deal for a web company in the last five years, bigger than eBay's takeover of Skype; or Google's purchase of Youtube. Nobody saw this one coming. Largely, because Cisco, as a web company, makes little sense.

The acquisition — by a hugely important but rather boring hardware maker, of a sexy web conferencing service — is akin to Sony's acquisition of a Hollywood studio. The execs will talk endlessly about the synergies; magazines will devote cover stories to convergence; and the combination will look increasingly vainglorious over time.

We presume John Chambers, a chief exec who hasn't had much media profile recently, was encouraged by Dan Scheinman, head of Cisco's media solutions group. From Scheinman, the exec who led the acquisitions of Scientific Atlanta, Linksys and, most recently, Tribe, we can no doubt expect a strategic rationale as empty as the one behind Cisco's social network strategy: "so consumers can consume what they want online."

Update: so here's the official rationale, from Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer, a title I haven't seen before:

Cisco is an innovation company and the philosophy at the core of our innovation strategy is to use the "network as a platform" for the next explosion in business and consumer applications. WebEx fits this philosophy exactly, as their technology is network- based and hides complexity from not only users, but from their IT organizations as well.

Clearly, our view is that most forms of communications and collaboration will be provided by the IP network. Cisco is at the forefront of evolving the network from pure connectivity to a reliable, sophisticated platform for communications and IT services, and WebEx will now be our partner on this journey.

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