Investor-ex, interesting post. Let's see...
re-<<<Cisco's routers are a component of the (current) Internet infrastructure. They are no more the heart and soul of Internet commerce than fiber optic cable, modems, POTS lines, switches, hubs, brouters, ISP's, T1 lines, T3 lines, TCP/IP, e-mail, PC's, browsers, operating systems, ISDN, domains, gateways, search engines, HTML, security schemes, and a hundred other things in production or on the drawing board, and these are just examples of the infrastructure layer.>>>
Using this thought process I could make the same argument with regards to Intel. Intel's chips are no more the heart and soul of a computer than the OS, monitors, modems, software, bios, multimedia chipsets, sound boards, CD's, 3.5 floppies, DVD, Zip drives, RAM, SRAM, motherboards and hundreds of other things in production or on the drawing board.
It just depends on what you mean by "heart and soul". I obviously use the context of those words differently than you do.
The fact is that Internet commerce as it stands today utilizes to a vast degree Cisco's routers for their transations. Whether that will change in the future is anybodies guess. If Cisco see's high demand for there routers and by speaking to their customers discovers that the reason is increased Internet Commerce. This puts them in a unique position to make predictions about the potential market.
Cisco's future is inexurably tied to Internet Commerce. If their predictions are wrong and they under or oversupply the industry. Their business will suffer tremendously. That gives them a unique motivation to be right about their forcasts.
Maybe this example will help get my point across. Let's say you could have anyone you want attend a round table discussion on the potential future of Internet Commerce. Wouldn't you invite Cisco's CEO to join in the discussion?? That's all I'm saying, join in the discussion. Not blindly follow his word, not treat it as the last word, just add his voice to the discussion.
I believe if you blindly disgarded his voice because of a perceived bias, your discussion would be missing some very important ingrediants. That's all I'm saying, and that's all I have ever said from the beginning of our discussion.
Michael
p.s. I'm sorry you missed the Cisco train today. The shorts were running for their lives. |
