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

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (64887)	10/2/2003 9:51:19 PM
From: Victor Lazlo	Respond to of 77397

Google and Interactive are in talks to do search stuff. It gets curiouser and curiouser.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (64887)	10/2/2003 10:02:29 PM
From: Stock Farmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77397

"Recovery"? What do you expect we are going to "Recover" to? Spending like 1999? Like 1998? Like 1997? There was no "recession" two years ago. There was a dramatic reduction in foolish capital spending on anything remotely related to communications technology. Spending plunged down from "obscene" to more normal rates. Not only was spending up in the goofy zone, but it was highly unbalanced as well. Hopefully, we won't "recover" to that any time soon. Indeed, unlike many popular pundits, I expect that we have already "recovered" (we've been recovered for a while but don't know how to recognize it), and that there will be more "job losses" going on as imbalances correct. We are only two years into restoring an imbalance that took two decades to build and reached deeply into our education system and the career training tracks of a generation. Folks who have spent a while dreaming of being a software millionaire are being forced to look at the reality of working at something they are more likely to achieve. The boom is over. Not to say there won't be opportunity. Just that low hanging fruit have been plucked and eaten. Now it's just going to be hard work. When industry is experiencing single digit growth in their top line, it's hard to grow elements of the bottom line at double digits for very long. Not while retaining any profit margin. A while ago you were all excited about productivity enhancements. But productivity enhancement translated into business terms means Do More with Less. Which is anathema to "Same people paid More". Some of the claimed productivity enhancements being delivered are in fact mythical, and this is leading to quite serious job loss in the areas which have a track record of delivering myths. A sensible thing, IMHO. Then there are the real productivity gains. Real in the sense that it takes fewer people to deliver the same top line. And in many cases freeing up more people than can be deployed to increase the top line. Which is also the stuff that "job loss" is made of. Perhaps folks who are worried about "job loss" should be looking more closely to those companies that make all those wonderful "productivity" suites. Kind of ironic that the guy in one cube is busy making the guy in the next cube redundant. And vice versa. Mutual Assured Destruction of jobs. Even stranger that the very people who are contributing to this are the ones wailing loudest about it. Aren't you in the business of deploying productivity enhancements? Progress is a two-edged sword.