It used to be said that as General Motors goes, so goes the U.S. economy. Today GM is a peripheral. Without bloating John Chambers' ego, however, it could be posited that as Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) goes, so goes the economy.
Cisco has its fingers in so many things--from telecommunications to government business--that when the company's CEO reports that "we have a couple of pockets that we have to fly through," as Chambers did when detailing first quarter earnings, the markets shake.
While Cisco continued to post good results, orders from cable operators fell 35 percent from a year ago. That's a bit different than results from other tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Intel, which haven't shown similar weakness. Which leads to the question: Is Cisco the leading edge of a new problem or, as Chambers suggested, just going through a rough patch?
For more:
- the New York Times has this story
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