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

To: Ibexx who wrote (19939)	12/19/1998 7:48:00 PM
From: dreydoc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

Thread: Anyone else see the recent televised NT add's? Shows a guy at the office checking his e-mail/voicemail/fax from a unified desktop mail system. He pauses and replay's (with voice command) a message from his son...fade to black, Nortel logo, something something communications..future. Back to some silly Wendy's golf classic. If Cisco is seriously considering a move in the consumer market, can we anticipate a battle shaping up for brand identity much like we see today for the internet search engines? Can any company do the enterprise, carrier, AND consumer market and pull it off well? I wonder now if, when Chambers extol's end-to-end networking he really means IOS everywhere, including our homes? The vision thing is great, but the magnitude of the execution is kinda scary. Software, hardware, mindaware. Whew. dd

To: Ibexx who wrote (19939)	12/20/1998 12:32:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 77400

re: Dinosaur cutlets Ibexx, thanks for the reply. I really didn't think of anyone eating NT in one gulp, and was merely speculating. NT's numbers and performance are modest to say the least. The trouble with being a dinosaur is that there are few T. rex around to eat you, and usually none with powerful enough digestive systems to do anything useful with the corpse. I love CISCO -- it really thinks. Were I in the trade, I would love to be acquired by it. It deserves to be valued as the best of the real Internet companies. As an outsider I pecked decades ago at a few of the neurons in the upper nerve plexus of that old saurian A.T.&T. trying to direct their attention to computer networking. It was NIH, can't violate the consent decree, can't cross operational borders, and who are Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie anyway (designer of UNIX and C at Bell Labs)? And all the time in that Cretaceous slime, there was a Lucent waiting to be born. Who knew? When I think of the hundreds of thousands of people -- many of them really brilliant and ambitious -- who were encrusted in that company it angers me to this day. Of course, I've always cheered the mammals, something about loyalty to the order. I believe that those companies who (1) recruit the best people; (2) acquire (and create) the best technology; (3) mobilize their creativity and commitment to apply technology to solve basic problems; and (4) share the proceeds of their success with their people, their customers, and stockholders will flourish. I think CISCO is one of the few big companies really to try this approach. It is big enough that it is threatened with being crippled in its search for technology by the AT laws. Acquiring NT is probably a pipe dream. I think NT has a lot of prime resources, but is weakly managed probably won't make it in the long haul. They are playing in too a tough a league.