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To: Logain Ablar who wrote (2760)	6/12/2002 2:15:55 AM
From: John Pitera	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2850

Great article... very true..Fiber Firms Grew Too Big for Their Switches ------------- James J. Cramer Fiber Firms Grew Too Big for Their Switches By James J. Cramer 06/10/2002 02:36 PM EDT URL: thestreet.com Click here for the latest from James J. Cramer. Would you have done differently if you were Corning (GLW:NYSE - news - commentary) or Lucent (LU:NYSE - news - commentary) ? Would you have been more prudent in 2000 than they were? Can you blame them for what happened? It's not clear. As I have noted, this weekend I spent a couple of hours poring through the old Velocita deal, a company that filed bankruptcy last week, and I was blown away that one of the biggest risk factors to this company's survival was its ability to secure fiber optic equipment and fiber itself, and how it revealed that Lucent couldn't meet its orders. If you were Corning or Lucent or Nortel (NT:NYSE - news - commentary) or JDS Uniphase (JDSU:Nasdaq - news - commentary) two years ago, can you imagine the pressure you were under to open plants, hire people and expand? Can you imagine how much business you had to turn down because you didn't have capacity? And how could you possibly sit there and say, "You know what, this is all a fad and we are going to regret that we are expanding so fast to meet the demand that we have." I think that would have been the equivalent of committing corporate suicide. Yet that's exactly what you would have had to do. With so many companies getting funding and so many orders to be had, it is inconceivable that such prudence wouldn't have been perceived as sloth or recklessness. So now we see the downside of all of that expansion. Cuts that can't be made fast enough, funds that can't be raised fast enough and stocks that can't fall fast enough in a weird movie-in-reverse that we are all watching, and some are actually still participating in. These companies all look so stupid now. We see JDS Uniphase's Jozef Straus on television and we want to throw a brick at it. We're sick of hearing how all goes well at Corning, and then right on top of that prognosis we get a steaming equity offering. I'm done talking about Lucent and Nortel. But let's remember what got these good companies into their bad situations: too much too fast. Brutal.