You forget that Juniper is having quite a bit of success against Cisco. Check out their latest coup with AOL. Chinese companies can bring a lot of capital and educated labor to bear on tackling the networking market, and believe me, they will.
Luckily, that will take time, but within 5-10 years, Huawei or some other Chinese companies, will be a major player within the networking industry and Cisco's margins will be quite a bit lower.
Also, comparing Cisco to Microsoft is not exactly accurate. Microsoft is closer to a monopoly than Cisco is. Cisco's gear, in many cases, can be turned into commodities. It's hard to do it with the higher end products because of IOS, but Juniper has already proved that this is possible.
If there's one thing we've learned, it's that China goes after industries with fat margins. Networking will succumb to the China onslaught. Just watch.
Coke, MSFT, Ford, GE, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM
Coke has tremendous brand power, but is not immune. There are already lots of knockoff throughout the world.
MSFT - piracy has taken its toll, but MSFT will survive. They are as close as you can get to a truly worldwide monopoly.
Ford - China will eventually be able to compete effectively with Ford. There are already a huge amount of companies in China that are starting to build up car manufacturing industries. Once they mature in that industry, Ford will find itself with a new formidable competitor to rival its Japanese competitors. But Ford will survive.
GE - very well diversified with many products. China may nip here and there, but GE will survive.
Intel - Already, Chinese companies are competing in many of the R&D areas that are traditionally Intel's, but more than likely the big hurt here will be offshoring of Intel R&D, which will cost U.S. jobs, but Intel will survive.
QCOM - China is competing very fiercely in this arena. I remember reading that China already had a couple of their own standards that compete with QCOM CDMA. Eventually, QCOM will disappear and be replaced by newer standards. QCOM may never make much headway into the Chinese market.
IBM - They'll be around for another 100 years. |
