Last week BusinessWeek's Rob Hof asked "What Did Cisco's $3.2 Billion for WebEx Buy?"

Rob's choices were:

 

1) A channel for its cool telepresence system, according to Sean Ness.

2) A pig in a poke, opines Mike Arrington and a number of commenters on his post. They figure WebEx is too heavy compared to a number of up-and-coming Web conferencing services, and doesn't work as well on different platforms.

3) The future of collaboration, according to Om Malik, who points out, "Shared workspaces, email and even office type apps are part of WebEx’s extended offerings." And WebEx has 2 million customers already.

4) Sex appeal, says Valleywag. Huh? Only in the Valley, I guess.

I just posted a blog on Collaboration Loop about the deal. My view is closer to Arrington's, but for different reasons.

Update: My Collaboration Loop posts have been moved over to the Enterprise 2.0 Blog. The link above has been changed to point to the new location.