The one luxury that the leaders in technology have, is that the can be somewhat slow to bringing new technology to the forefront. Intel and Microsoft are prime examples of how a leading company can wait for the young start ups to initiate new technology, bring it to market, prove its success, and later develop the own technology which ultimately wins over.
The battle of the the browsers is the best example there is. Netscape initiated a successful and adoptable web browser, Microsoft saw the support for this type of product and soon the rest will all be history. Similar story with the hayes modem.
Battling the dominators of an industry is an extremely difficult task and this is why Cisco's stock nears all time highs and the rest of the industry is meandering somewhere significantly lower. I think the best bet against Cisco is going to LU, provided the two of them do not get together. Should LU decided to issue some of its currency in October to puchase competeing technology to Cisco, I think Cisco's shares could soften.
Bay has been making a lot of significant aquisitions which is building itself, day by day, to be a very likely aquisition by a LU. The only other likely marriage that I see, is with ASND. Bay just needs to get to the core of the internet with ATM, with award winning leading technolgy, and it will have a very good chance. So far, the are making some strategic moves in that direction.
This fall will be very interesting for networking and currently my bets are on Bay because of its broader product line and advancement in areas of new technolgy, namely gE.
Wayde. |
