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

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (14661)	6/22/1998 2:28:00 PM
From: dougjn	Respond to of 77400

New technology behomoths, or Gorillas, tend to be born, and old ones tend to loose their leading position, when there is a major change in technology. Small changes happen every few months, or more often. I'm talking about stuff as transforming as the rise of the Internet, the rise of the personal computer. Etc. A typical name for changes of this magnitude is a paradigm shift. Of course that term is now so overused that it has tended to be seen as meaningless. In its orignial, true meaning it is not at all meaningless. Possible paradigm shifting level changes in the future are: the rise of thin client (network) computing; the rise of satellite based internet networks; affordability and practicality of true expert system computing (combined with ready net access to VAST databases); voice recognition and synthesis. It is not at all clear that the stuff most applicable to Cisco will upset its perch. Leading tech cos. have gotten wise to adapting to the sorts of changes that toppled IBM from its perch, and threatened for a time to fell it altogether. E.g., Cisco has adapted very well to the declining primacy of the Router, and moved quickly towards ATM and high end switching by smaller acquisitions, when they looked potential threatening. That is one of the reasons why Chambers management is viewed as so superb. Like IBM in the heyday of mainframes, Csco is the firm you go to to avoid the pitfalls of rapid change and interoperability pitfalls. Cisco can do it all. You don't get fired for choosing Csco. Even if Ascend or 3com or someone else has some piece which temporarily has a better price/performance. Doug