JDN, re SUNW, the valuation is still very high, although I could let myself overlook that for CSCO and EMC, buy those. I think it was because they are gorillas. SUNW sure was a great buy before the "network is the computer and the dot in dot com" stuff. May still be. Have to think about it.
I was thinking about something, that some companies sure were in the right place (products) at the right time. How about the 3 above? I read a little about Cisco's early goings. Their first venture was to buy an IBM style mainframe, and then develop a network connectivity product for it. I'm guessing token Ring. Now, how much does that have to do with the Internet, which is 99.44% responsible for Cisco's huge success? Not much. The Internet took off, and Cisco with it.
EMC started making storage boxes compatible with IBM mainframes. Try to steal a little of IBM's storage business. Essentially nothing to do with the Internet. Now, with people on Intranets and Internets swapping big files consisting of pictures, power point presentations, every day, and all the millions of rich web pages (one of the big 4 OEMs alone has over a million web pages), takes horrendous amounts of storage to support all that. EMC fell into it.
Sun developed a good, robust Unix platform for CAD and other design work long before the Internet got popular. It, and much bigger servers now (which they had the foresight to buy the design rights for from Cray Research) became the server of choice for the Internet. IA based is catching up though.
Like some sports guy said 'I'd rather be lucky than good.'
Sure, sure, you have to execute in product development, MFG, marketing, sales, etc., etc., but quite often companies develop a product for one thing, and an altogether different market makes it take off.
Tony |
