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

To: RetiredNow who wrote (69522)	1/16/2006 11:41:02 AM
From: Sr K	Respond to of 77400

I am more optimistic about Cisco, and by end of January might project a 6% increase for 11 months rather than a 6% decline. But I still wouldn't invest my money in the stock.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (69522)	1/16/2006 7:05:44 PM
From: Sr K	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

OT** A great call by mindmeld on IRID. Message 8584165

To: RetiredNow who wrote (69522)	1/16/2006 8:47:06 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

my problem is that I don't think margins are as high on the consumer side.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (69522)	1/17/2006 12:28:25 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 77400

LONDON (Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:CSCO - News) plans to expand its share of the consumer electronics market by selling phones, radios and home theater equipment, the Financial Times reported on Monday. Bad idea. CSCO's core competence is in things that are tied to the network. Once you get to the "edge" devices such as those listed above, the connection to the network should be completely standardized and non-proprietary, and thus CSCO will have no meaningful competitive advantage over competitors (such as NOK or the Asian consumer electronics companies). It sounds similar to MSFT's efforts to move into markets that are off the PC, they will make a dent of course, because they are so large, but the success will be nowhere near what it has been in the core network connected realm.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (69522)	1/17/2006 5:46:00 AM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

RE: "So what do you folks think" I think Charles really shouldn't fantasize on the cover of FT.com. Chambers may want to get the mic back for a spell and do some damage control. Charles does have some good nuggets that are worthwhile, but the dominate the world thing won't work, and here's why: Cisco is a plumbing company. It is neither sexy like Apple, HP, Sony's consumer products (does Charles know which colors/contours are in vogue right now?), nor low-cost like Dell & Asian firms, so the home entertainment system is out. You can't compete by being caught in the middle - you would get squeezed out. (Take a look at the plunging prices of flat tv panel displays at Costco - while Samsung is making a 40% increase in profits even in the face of this plunge.) Competing with Samsung in home entertainment systems will bankrupt Cisco. Don't go there. There are some very valid infrastructure parts Cisco could sell/provide to the home entertainment manufacturers (if Charles hasn't pissed them all off with his comment.) As far as selling phones, I've already posted Cisco's weakness here. While their stationary phones are very high quality (though not cost-competitive to Asian phones that keep breaking), they really need to partner with a software provider like a MSFT if they want to own high-end to middle. There are some simple things Cisco just gets stuck on in the marketplace that MS could easily fix, as posted earlier. I love the idea of Cisco selling high-end radios. Was just looking at my Sony the other day (with frustration), and thought of what I wanted that box to do and felt that Cisco would be an excellent provider of such a consumer radio because it would interface with the network in ways that would play out Cisco's strength. However, aside from creating a high-end unit to grease the market, Cisco should really create OEM radio consumer device partners instead and sell them the technology. The domination attitude would be monolithic and limiting in revenue. One can imagine all the things that could be done with this here, including from an ISV standpoint, so I think an industry communication standard would be the better way to go than some monolithic Cisco-only solution. Promote a better compression than MP3, and that would really help a lot. Give me a way to buy uncompressed songs that I can access anytime anywhere and later compress them into whatever compression flavor of the day for whatever device. Why Cisco is bothering with a DVD device, shouldn't the industry be further than the DVD stage by now. One area that absolutely would be an excellent area for Cisco to enter would be consumer home video surveillance. Cisco's signature stamp. PC Oems consider this stuff totally boring, yet it's the perfect plumbing infrastructure project for Cisco. In the past couple of months, Cupertino has had 40 Asian home burglaries and one of them had no force of entry so a video system would have really helped them a lot. Imagine a Cisco system that interfaces with the network so 3rd party video archiving enables alert detection of a moving van that backs up into a person's driveway. You can imagine how motivated that community is to get neighborhood networked surveillance. Not just home surveillance, but neighborhood surveillance where each home owner is networked together with their other neighbors by a common system. We currently don't give communities the proper tools to empower their own protection. Palo Alto has rather suspicious people driving through the neighborhoods taking pictures of homes in a way that appears to be a ring trying to get their theft plan figured out ahead of time. They keep stealing from homes by the creeks. That neighborhood area needs a networked community surveillance. My friend said the home alarms aren't worthwhile, because burglars have these devices that just zap out an alarm system because they each company uses something like the same frequency (and thieves have devices specific to a company's alarm). They really couldn't do that to a wireless video system that has multiple video systems duplicated on the network similar to what Cisco does to avoid a network from going down. People overseas build their own custom alarms since the car alarms are easily zapped out by a device you can pick up at Fry's. When a colleague of mine went out of town, he set up some type of home video surveillance which he pumped out thru the Internet (created interesting water cooler talk) - it was really cool, except it really needed software to detect a moving van backing up into a driveway. Cisco could redirect consumer surveillance companies (these firms are not standardized at all, so nothing works with anything) to a higher level development work and turn them into partners to grow the market rather than competitors. So I think Cisco needs to stay focused on plumbing core infrastructure stuff, not home theatres otherwise they could go bankrupt trying to compete in an area they don't know. Regards, Amy J