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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (51769)	4/18/2001 11:03:10 AM
From: Rob C.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 77397

ppfffftttt... 18.60 with a trade at 19, does anyone hear that noise?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (51769)	4/18/2001 12:58:49 PM
From: Stock Farmer	Respond to of 77397

mindmeld: I believe you built an app that made so many people's jobs unnecessary. Now, this is what I call "local optimization". I bet all over whatever company you worked for there were lots of these going on. And that if you added up the total savings of all the local optimizations that the company "saved" a lot. Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt. But golly gee whillikers if you go and look at the company's gross margin... heck, it probably didn't go up... so where did all that savings go? Got to ask whether it's real in the first place. Those 8 peas just got "repurposed" (what an ugly word to use for people) under different shells. I doubt the full accounting of the net effect to the business even crossed your mind to do. Were they as productive as they used to be? Did you increase productivity in one area, only to decrease it somewhere else? Any collateral effects? All costs accounted for? You probably can't even answer accurately because that data is never even collected. I remember studying one group that automated a very laborious process that took ten people to do. They served a group of about 4,000. Headcount went down by 9 of course. A weekend's work saved lots of money, right? Deserved their reward for phenomenal ROI, right? Wrong. 4000 people had to do an extra few minutes thinking each... Sluurp. Macro productivity vanished. This is so typical it is not funny. This kind of math nearly killed IBM years ago. Read "Big Blues" for a fascinating account. Demming also has a lot to say on this myth. Bottom line: unless you can point me to a company where gross margins are improving, you can't point me to a company that is "improving its productivity". Period. By definition. And that's the whole point of the exercise. So if the Internet is such a great productivity increaser, where's that big productivity decreaser that we should be investing in the solution for? 'Cause that's even bigger than the Internet! John