Unlike Wintel, even mobile/cloud still needs network equipment LOL. It's a pretty amazing business, when you think about how much you pay per Ethernet port to

Unlike Wintel, even mobile/cloud still needs network equipment LOL. It's a pretty amazing business, when you think about how much you pay per Ethernet port to run your business, and how much goes to Cisco, and what it costs to make that equipment. Think about what you pay for a firewall, router, switch vs. a server. But software-defined networking seems like a paradigm shift that will be rather disruptive. Just makes no sense to buy all those firewall, router, and switch boxes, when they could all be virtualized and integrated (like VMware did to servers, and they want to do to networks with the Nicira SDN acquisition). Meanwhile, Cisco makes a lot of acquisitions, many of which seem pretty stupid: Scientific-Atlanta and NDS, just when cable TV is about to get its lunch eaten by over-the-top; Flip video camera (Pure Digital) just when it's about to become an iPhone feature (and I guess they couldn't turn it into GoPro) Then they bought back $70b worth of stock since the dot-com crash, distributed a rather hefty chunk of that to management. Enterprise value down to $96b. So...could be a great business but not sure it's a great strategy or great management.