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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Junkyardawg who wrote (25785)	4/2/2000 7:09:00 PM
From: Don Pueblo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 63513

Oh, man, I have no idea. No idea. I actually don't look at it that way. I have a much more cynical view. So cynical that I hesitate to put it on the Internet. I don't think MSFT is going to be hurt much by anything short of Global Nuclear War. The stock price, on the other hand, is something I really can't speculate about. This year has not gone the way I thought it would so far. I thought the market would have gotten cremated way before this. So to be honest, I really don't know what will happen. That's why I am so interested in the next two weeks. I want to see how the Y2K thing actually plays out. You remember all the hoopla that these companies were spreading around 6 months ago about how the numbers would be soft because of Y2K and all that. I am not smart enough to understand how all that translates into numbers and bottom lines. There are lots of really sharp fundamental people on SI but I guarantee I am not one of them. Not even close. Let's ask Tommy Dorsey. He knows everything. <G>

To: Junkyardawg who wrote (25785)	4/2/2000 7:32:00 PM
From: Don Pueblo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 63513

I'll say this, dawgster: I learned a really good lesson about 2 years ago. Most people have forgotten about it, but I remember it really well. One day, AT&T's data transmission lines went down for a whole day. Now, this is a kinda big deal. This is a major fup. Not good. Remember that? And it turned out that there was some trouble with... ...Cisco routers. Arrrrgghhh. Not a Good Thing. At the time, I thought that it was Bad. Very Very Very Bad for Cisco. But here is what happened: Cisco jumped on it. I mean, they jumped on it fast. Fast like nuclear fast. They put people on fast jets and they sent equipment and they kicked ass and they fixed the problem. And there has been no problem since then. And T could have said, "Uh...thanks...we are going to try some different equipment. Have a real nice day, see ya, bye bye." But they didn't. And the lesson I learned is this: it's not what goes wrong. Things go wrong. You plan on stuff working perfectly, and you get your market share because things work right and don't break. But other companies besides CSCO could have moved in like hyenas with blood in the air at that point, and I don't know...but I'll bet they did. I know I would have if I were a sales rep for somebody else, I guaran friggin' tee I would have been ALL OVER T at that point no question. But Cisco took responsibility instantly, and they fixed the problem. I kinda wonder what it was like there in the Big Offices at CSCO that day, but I suspect it was pretty much 'business as usual'. Which it appears to me in Cisco's case is 'our business as usual is about three times as fast as whatever hallucination you have about your own business as usual, and that's the way we kick ass, so don't get in the way when you see our asses coming'. So what I am saying is that John Chambers talks a LOT about execution. He talks a LOT about it publicly. These guys that think CSCO is going to go down the toilet and their technology is going to become outdated and other people will take away their market and all that just fail to realize that a company that has the viewpoint that CSCO has just cannot fail. They cannot fail. The only way they will fail is if they change the way they operate, and that does not look like it will happen. I look for companies like that. Companies that say "Hey, we screwed up. We think we know what happened. We have a crew on it right now. Also, we have a senior engineer in the air on a private chartered jet right now, he will be in your office in an hour and a half, which is 4 a.m. your time, so we need somebody to open the door for him and we need somebody to let the truck in with the new parts so let your guard at the gate know we are coming right now, and you call me personally if my people are not there at 4 am and here is my direct line." That's called "execution", and that's who wins. Compare that with that EBAY deal where EBAY went down last year for a day and the CEO comes on the site and leaves a lame message about how they don't understand what happened and they think maybe one of their vendors screwed up and we promise it will NEVER NEVER happen again and would you like a glass of milk and a Lorna Doone? And then the site crashes AGAIN about a month later. It's the people that just shut up and say "Yeah I did it and I'm fixing it and...oh...now it's fixed no charge to you and call me if you have another problem but we don't think you will because we fixed that thing that caused the problem already." that will make the Internet work. That's the people I want to invest in.