... wiping out 1 year of gains in a day. CSCO is such a stupid stock, doesn't even keep up with S&P growth.
I'm holding about 3k stocks and feeling the pain of today's 12% drop 😓
6 replies (most recent on top)
People don't understand how the stock market works.
It's exactly how development at Cisco works. When a 1-3 month program overruns by years it's always "the problem was so complicated that NO ONE could have imagined it and we're so great for rising to the occasion!" despite presentations by engineering at the start to engineering and management alike correctly explaining exactly how the program was going to fail.
Cisco isn't the first large company I worked for and this is very much par for the course. It's not like connecting a few logic gates without feedback with a 99.999% guarantee of what output will result from a given input. This is the psychology of 85,000 at best somewhat imbalanced people fighting each other, and I expect few CEOs at any large company really know over 100 of their employees.
Steve Jobs was able to form a cult of personality to make the Macintosh consistent, reliable and easy to use, but once he started to take ill the usability issues directly attributed to Jobs himself fell apart, subsystems from NeXTstep which were reliable for DECADES became buggy to the point of uselessness, and despite Jobs' rightful fight against Adobe Flash due to endless security problems the number of "own the box" holes that could be exploited in Apple's iOS from acts like playing an audio file or receiving a text are astonishing.
John Chambers has his own cult of personality which other threads on TheLayoff.com show persists to this day, but many of the cultural problems that exist today were common practice under Chambers since the 1990s. I don't know what he inherited or what he created but the die was cast back then and I doubt there is anyone who could take the role of CEO at Cisco and effectively correct the entire culture from top to bottom.
People don't understand how the stock market works.
When the stock price goes up, it's due to the hard work and skills of the CEO and ELT and they deserve an increased bonus.
When the stock price goes down, it's due to external factors and market forces, so the CEO and ELT are not responsible and still get paid their bonuses.
I sold all mine at $53.05 the day before earnings. Glad to be out of it.
Our Cisco leadership has been misleading employees and the market, and it is catching up to us. Nobody asked why we laid off so many people in one of our of best quarters ever. That should have been a clue. Until leadership has integrity again, treats people better and stops stuffing the pockets of the Execs, the stock will continue to struggle. I know some who were laid off are now decision makers or influencers and they are generally NOT buying Cisco. Why should they after what we did to them? When we sc--w people, it make take a year or two, but it will eventually catch up to us. This is a taste of it. No surprise here.
It’s ok, market adjustments are going and not only for Cisco
But Cisco definitely must focus more on software, maybe even security platforms similar to splunk
If not, Cisco must come out with something crazy new and innovative in router/hardware world
You can only fool investors for so long.