Jack-- Overall, what I gathered from the entire article was a general feeling that the authors were correct. In listening and reading direct comments over the years from Roth(NT), McGinn(LU), Chambers(CSCO), and even Benhamou(COMS), the authors hit the nail on the head about their visions.
But that vision certainly doesn't mean it translates directly into how they position their real world companies. For example Chambers has an IP vision that is way out there, but concedes his companies product positioning has to take into account the current trillion dollar infrastructure if he is to get into the telco spending space. Roth has talked much of the 100 year old circuit switched infrastructure, but look at where he's positioned his company with their leading optical products.
Here are three excerpts from the article that are pretty telling and sum up the top three(I don't know how Benhamou got in the group at all) quite well.
________________
"The PBX is a dinosaur. It goes away completely. It will be a concentration point for data/voice/video. We could have some very healthy discussions on whether this occurs in two years or five years. But the answer is yes."
--John Chambers, Cisco
"There are going to be a lot of PBXes around for a lot of time. The depreciation schedules on those are probably about six or seven years."
--Rich McGinn, Lucent
"Get data off the voice network."
--John Roth, Nortel
_______________
As far as the article's comments about LU dropping the ball in OC-192 and now lead in DWM, well it wasn't an opinion of the writers. It came straight from the horse's mouth(McGinn) during their excuse conference call. At least that is where I thought he said it out loud. I know I heard him say it somewhere. As far as it's accuracy, I have no idea?
I can't even begin to figure out which of the three are going to be on top in revenue, market cap, or even more importantly, the bottom line. IMHO, I think it's almost useless to attempt to figure it out. In the case of the big three, I'm assuming all three, because of their CEOs, are going to do quite well and I'll maintain positions in all of them. --MikeM(From Florida) |
