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To: ROBERT who wrote (11761)	3/27/2000 12:57:00 PM
From: bob	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18366

Repost from DABOSS on RB. THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD... WHERE WILL EDIG BE IN 10 YEARS ??? As you can see, from a modest start with relatively few employees, up against huge competition, a lot can happen. AND YOU ARE HERE !!! ********************** Monday, March 27, 2000, 11:53 AM Why Cisco Is On Top By Eric Nee Last week Cisco passed Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world. The torch has now been passed. The Internet Era is upon us. The PC Era is coming to a close. Over the next few months there is likely to be some jockeying between Microsoft and Cisco for the lead. But by the end of this year I expect Cisco to be the clear number one, and remain so for the foreseeable future. What makes this all the more remarkable is that Cisco has been a publicly traded company for only 10 years. Ten Years! (It went public Feb. 16, 1990, with some 250 employees and $69 million in annual revenues.) Since then it's been a steady march up. In November of last year Cisco passed the $300 billion valuation mark. In February it passed $400 billion. And last week it reached $575 billion. I wrote my first feature story about Cisco shortly after they went public, in 1991. I was a freelance writer at the time, and came up with the idea to profile a relatively unknown, but hot, networking company that was selling multi-protocol routers as fast as it could make them. (The IP protocol is all that matters today, but in the beginning Cisco made its mark by being able to route data traffic from the myriad number of proprietary networks that were then in place.) The illustration for the story, which appeared in Upside magazine, was particularly apt. It pictured John Morgridge, then CEO and now chairman of Cisco, dressed as a traffic cop "routing" a flow of cash into his company. Since then the cash has just kept flowing in. I wish I could say I was prescient, and knew that the Internet would take off and Cisco would dominate the networking equipment market as it has done. (If I'd known that, I would have sunk my savings into Cisco stock and be sitting on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean right now.) What I was impressed with, right from the beginning, is the common sense approach Cisco brought to its business. The company was never so enamored of itself that it wasn't willing to listen to outsiders, and shift course when necessary. A lot of that, I believe, comes from Morgridge. When he joined the company in 1988 it had less than 50 employees. When he turned it over in 1995 to his handpicked successor, John Chambers, it had about 3,500 and over $2 billion in revenues. Morgridge is one of the most down-to-earth CEOs I've ever met. For years I used to run into him at Ulevich & Orrange's annual parties in their four-room Palo Alto office (they were Cisco's public relations firm until Cisco grew too large). I could always find Morgridge by the shrimp bowl munching away. And he was always willing to engage in a conversation. It was under Morgridge that Cisco started its now famous acquisition strategy. Morgridge recognized early on that it should use its domination of the router market to move into adjacent sectors of the networking business. And if another company could get Cisco into a new market faster, it bought it. The NIH syndrome never afflicted Cisco. As a result, the company had a constant in-flow of new employees bringing in new ideas. It's a lot like Silicon Valley, where Cisco is based. You can't work and live around here without being exposed constantly to new ideas. As a result, Cisco's employees never drank the Kool-Aid. Morgridge may eat a lot of shrimp, but he's always willing to listen to other people's opinions. I've known lots of people, both professional and personally, who worked at Cisco, and by-and-large they have maintained an intellectually honest and open view of the world. Contrast this with two superpowers of the past. When I was a reporter in the mid-1980s we always used to complain, and joke, about IBM employees acting like robots. You could always be sure to hear the company line when talking with an IBMer. Sadly, the same turned out to be true at Microsoft. Many of its employees are now company men in the worst sense of the word. That problem has worsened in the last couple of years as Microsoft turned inward in reaction to the Justice Department's suit. Now that Cisco is on top, let's hope they don't follow the path paved by IBM and Microsoft. It's difficult not to, but all indications are that Chambers is following Morgridge's lead--though I have yet to see him at the shrimp bowl.