Be careful about "Faith in Cisco."
Cisco used to be a great company: great engineering, able to turn on a dime and interested in their customers.
Now they are over 10,000 people. Many are VIP (vesting in peace)
All of the "routing Gods" have left for a company called Juniper networks. This company, so far, has remained quiet about what they are working on. The current engineers are in "maintenance mode" as far as the routing part of IOS.
Most of the A list players have left for startups, or just plain retired. The people in place now are not the ones who created the "Cisco Legend" that people on this list keep clinging to.
TAG Switching was a reaction to Ipsilon and its main goal was to gain "mindshare" and implementation is secondary. It also provides a great motivation for customers to by Stratacom (instead of Cascade) to connect their Cisco routers together.
Many customers loved Cisco because of the access they had to engineering and the attention they could get from the company. Now, if you aren't a $20,000,000.00 account, they tell you to "go look at the Web site" for support. Many small companies will be successful because they can pay attention to their customers.
Cisco is still a great company and will do well, but the LA times article had it correct. Cisco (about 2 years ago) moved from building "Best in class" products to a strategy that locked customers into existing products.
Just recently the head IBM Marketing guy left Cisco to go back to IBM. Just think about that, leaving Cisco for IBM. I almost fell off my chair.
I would still buy the stock at these levels, but be careful, they are not the giant that people on this list think they are. Their internal propaganda is strong (read Frank and John's comments), so you must balance anything you hear from internal folks with some common sense.
They are a big company with alot of marketshare. Maintaining this market share is a now a higher priority than product innovation. |
