To all of those who say why MikroTik doesn't expand and introduce more enterprise features—do you really want MikroTik to become another Cisco? Of course, it's very hard to turn a small company into a global beast on the market. Even Cisco might not have become what they become if they tried to do it now, when there is a lot of competition from multiple angles. In a way it's easier to be a pioneer when you establish your own standards and blaze the trail.
The point is, if MT indeed turned heavily towards enterprise market (and became successful at it), they would become a different company. They wouldn't bother dealing with $60-$500 devices for SOHO. And forget about perpetual licensing too. They would likely stop being what they are now and what draws so many people.
Sure, they have a niche market, but that is probably one reason why they are successful. They easily outcompete the likes of D-Link and Asus with more technical home users, while also outcompeting big boys in small-to-medium businesses thanks to the feature/cost ratio. They found their market, and there is nothing wrong to stay within it. Yes, a business always wants to grow, but there are several types of the growth: insatiable corporate greed, demanding forever expansion and acquisition; or normal stable healthy growth to sustain the business.
We also have to admit that MT does listen to its customers (sometimes![:lol:]( "Laughing")
). When I just found out about MT in 2021, everything I read online was that they are excellent for routing, bad for WiFi. And recently we saw a massive change in WiFi area with the new drivers. People also keep saying RouterOS is hard for newbies, and now they are trying to make it easier with smartphone apps. We also see how new features are constantly added to ROS 7. Example being mDNS repeater, people whined about it for so long (including me), and now it's there.
On the subject of newbies though, I think MT could do better. The functionality is all there, it's just a matter of creating a user-friendly front-end UI without taking away or changing anything else that's already in ROS. Quick Set is a good start but only for very basic things. If one wants to get just a bit deeper like VLANs or SQM or even parental controls (that's supposed to be easy, right?), now you have to open up the world of ROS complexity. Maybe MT could create a separate WinBox-like tool that would look and work more like UniFi controller. Like I said, the API and functionality is already there to do this. Smartphone apps is a good attempt at it, but still not powerful enough for more tech-savvy, and also apparently most new users don't know the apps exist. MT should probably add a piece of paper with a QR code to link to the apps.
I also think they can do better hardware-wise. They produce so many nice devices, but so many of them have just one or two features that would otherwise make a perfect device. This has been talked about many times. It's hard to believe MT doesn't understand this, yet they keep doing it over and over.
The point is, if MT indeed turned heavily towards enterprise market (and became successful at it), they would become a different company. They wouldn't bother dealing with $60-$500 devices for SOHO. And forget about perpetual licensing too. They would likely stop being what they are now and what draws so many people.
Sure, they have a niche market, but that is probably one reason why they are successful. They easily outcompete the likes of D-Link and Asus with more technical home users, while also outcompeting big boys in small-to-medium businesses thanks to the feature/cost ratio. They found their market, and there is nothing wrong to stay within it. Yes, a business always wants to grow, but there are several types of the growth: insatiable corporate greed, demanding forever expansion and acquisition; or normal stable healthy growth to sustain the business.
We also have to admit that MT does listen to its customers (sometimes
). When I just found out about MT in 2021, everything I read online was that they are excellent for routing, bad for WiFi. And recently we saw a massive change in WiFi area with the new drivers. People also keep saying RouterOS is hard for newbies, and now they are trying to make it easier with smartphone apps. We also see how new features are constantly added to ROS 7. Example being mDNS repeater, people whined about it for so long (including me), and now it's there.On the subject of newbies though, I think MT could do better. The functionality is all there, it's just a matter of creating a user-friendly front-end UI without taking away or changing anything else that's already in ROS. Quick Set is a good start but only for very basic things. If one wants to get just a bit deeper like VLANs or SQM or even parental controls (that's supposed to be easy, right?), now you have to open up the world of ROS complexity. Maybe MT could create a separate WinBox-like tool that would look and work more like UniFi controller. Like I said, the API and functionality is already there to do this. Smartphone apps is a good attempt at it, but still not powerful enough for more tech-savvy, and also apparently most new users don't know the apps exist. MT should probably add a piece of paper with a QR code to link to the apps.
I also think they can do better hardware-wise. They produce so many nice devices, but so many of them have just one or two features that would otherwise make a perfect device. This has been talked about many times. It's hard to believe MT doesn't understand this, yet they keep doing it over and over.
Statistics: Posted by anserk — Sat Apr 05, 2025 5:07 pm