Word: cisco
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...investors, this is a good time to contemplate such a turn. Tech stocks have repaired their millennial meltdown, giving you another chance to sell high, and you've seen that a "diversified" portfolio of Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Lucent and Yahoo doesn't offer much panic protection. Tech remains a great place to be long term--but not exclusively...
Actually, Cisco is run by a nonengineer. John Chambers sits amid the expanse of cubicles in an office as austere and tiny as an entry-level programmer's. His motto is, "Never ask your employees to do something you wouldn't be willing to do yourself." This culture of self-sacrifice and frugality means that Chambers and all top execs fly coach and have no reserved parking spaces. The same quest for efficiency has driven Cisco to make cutting-edge use internally of the networks it sells to other companies. Everything at Cisco--from health-insurance issues to softball schedules...
Even as the company has grown to become the king of the data network, it has remained, in many consumers' minds, a question mark. Ask most people what Microsoft or Intel do, and they'll tell you. But Cisco? "I don't know," says Harriet Sumner, 30, a customer-service manager for a computer-game company, "but I own the stock...
Chambers thinks it's important that people such as Sumner do know, especially now that Cisco wants to be successful in its other bold strategy: a march into the telecom business, where it will face a whole new level of well-entrenched competition. The $250 billion-a-year telephone-equipment business is where giants like AT&T's equipment-making spin-off, Lucent, and Canadian counterpart Nortel have built powerful, decades-long relationships with telephone companies and service providers. As voice and data networks converge--and data come to account for more than 90% of network traffic--Cisco has boasted...
Consumers, however, are still uneasy about IP telephone service. Do you really want your voice to be as unreliable as your Web connection? Cisco swears it has closed the gap and made its IP networks as reliable as voice networks. What would help, Cisco believes, is for consumers to come to believe in the Cisco brand to the point where they are exerting upward pressure on telephone companies and service providers to run Cisco networks. In other words, for Cisco to be able to apply a two-way squeeze from the corporate side and the consumer side so that your...