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

To: alex pierson who wrote (17852)	10/6/1998 10:18:00 PM
From: JRH	Respond to of 77400

The issue may be that with everyone trying to eat everyone else's lunch there may not be enough lunch to go around. Is that a possibility? No, there should be plenty to go around, and my guess is that all the big guys, especially LU & CSCO, will have enough to make some serious cash. The telecom industry is a monster. I do think that we have a little while longer before the big fight does happen since LU is no where near ready to bombard the industry with complete solutions, and CSCO is still working on their PBX Switch. Besides, the big telcos will want the technology to be well proven before they buy loads of them. All this is IMO, of course. Could margins be killed for all? Or will they all win out for at least a while? I don't think that margins will be a problem for a while, if ever. Look at Big Blue with their mainframes and CSCO with their Routers -- technology that has held their margins quite well. I guess there will not be that many competitors. Just 3-5 of them but currently in Cisco's business there seems to be just one really My un-educated guess is that there will be relatively few companies who can offer all of the solutions that the telcos will be looking for. The NN's, FORE's, and ASND's of the world will be niche players while the CSCO's, LU's, and NT's will be winning the big contracts. Are Lucent and Nortel better than the guys Cisco has been up against in the past? I think that what LU and NT have playing against them is that they are pretty big, old players. This tends to make one think that they are a bit more stodgy than the young, SV types that Cisco traditionally competes against. But IBM has that reputation as well, and I know firsthand that their SSD division is in no way like most people picture it. Now, NT did buy BAY. IF they can make the integration work, it might pan out for them. But, they did buy BAY, so I wouldn't be suprised if it would be a flop ;o) Or is Cisco going to be able to keep up some kind of great marketing and continue to rock CSCO has the best marketing around and they have a lot of name recognition for packet switching technologies. LU has good relationships with them telcos, though. I have no idea how it will pan out. But, I don't expect it to just boom all the sudden as if MSFT just released an OS or something. We have a ways to go. Just some of my opinions.... JRH