went back to check out headlines from the cisco era. was struck by how similar the discourse is. food for thought.
Cisco overtaking Microsoft "certainly validates the networked economy that Cisco is revolutionising," said Brian Goodstadt, an analyst with the Standard & Poor Equity Group.
Microsoft, while still a strong generator of corporate profits, generates much of its income from desktop applications and operating systems. While the Internet has boosted demand for Microsoft's products, Cisco, whose routers carry most of the traffic running over the network, is seen as a bigger beneficiary of its growth and its earnings gains have far outpaced Microsoft in recent quarters.
Quite possibly, Cisco Systems, the biggest maker of equipment that powers the Internet, will become for the Internet what Microsoft Corp, the biggest software company, was for the personal computer.
Judging by Cisco's market capitalisation, investors seem to believe that Cisco could become the technology standard bearer for Internet hardware. Microsoft, which was founded in 1975 and went public 11 years later, took 24 years to become the company investors value the most, but occupied that spot for less than one year. Analysts have said Cisco, which was founded in 1984 and went public in 1986, will likely remain top dog for much longer and has a shot at becoming the first firm ever to be worth $1 trillion.
‘Cisco replaces Microsoft as world’s most valuable company’ 3/25/2001
byu/greenchaos inwallstreetbets
Posted by greenchaos
40 Comments
Meh. $NVDA is more likely to go the way of $AAPL than $CSCO.
One thing for sure. Some people will get buttfucked so hard. Either the ones who wolds NVDA or the ones who shorts it.
That was March of 2000, not 2001. That makes a big difference, and something felt off to me, because the dot com bubble had already burst by 2001, and the market already well off it’s highs.
It traded near $80 during 3/2000, and by 3/2001, it traded down to $15.
calls…on…microsoft?
everyone saw ciscos problem from a mile away.
mainly that the switches they sold back then, are still in use today.
I would not compare NVDA with CSCO. They have lasted over 3 decades and have had dibs in different markets over the time period. CSCO was just about dot com boom and in 2000 did just under 19B in revenue and 2.7B in net income. Margins are no where near what NVDA is doing. I think NVDA will do > 100B in revenue and almost 50B in net income while growing at crazier rates than CSCO did at smaller scale.
NVDA moat is not just their AI chips but its more about how entrenched CUDA is. CSCO was disrupted by white box routers and switches. I dont think that will happen here. Plus NVDA will keep innovating in new areas like Auto and Robotics.
That said I expect NVDA to drop from the stratospheric levels sometime in the near future. But they will do well long term for sure.
CSCO was the picks and shovels of the dot com bubble. It was legit… Revenue was doubling every year.
Key differenec Nvidia keeps innovating, Cisco didnt.
Okay, what’s the market move being suggested here? Calls on Cisco?
The cisco comparisons are already so played out, and there’s plenty of readily available analysis out there to debunk this B.S. FUD. You should have went with the new trend and compare it to Nortel.
You forgot one crucial thing… that it’s different this time 
Bubble will pop when Microsoft, Meta, Google etc realize they spent 1 Trillion on AI and all they have to show for it is a chatbot that can make pictures of cats.
Reminder AI revenue is still a footnote of a footnote, despite the hundreds of billions in capex spent. No one is paying for access to Copilot or Gemini. For 99% of people AI is a toy they mess with a few times then forget about it.
The path to getting any sort of return is shoddy at best and if these companies don’t start showing any income for all that capex during the next 1-2 quarters they will get heemed to oblivion (see what happened to Meta with the Metaverse) and Nvidia will go down with them.
I swear if I see another shitpost about the .com bubble I’m gonna get NVDA leaps…
NVDA has the most market cap just based on LLM based Chatbots.
This isn’t even the ‘real AI’ aka ‘AGI’.
The release of chatgpt 5 (most likely this year) will rocket it further, then the robotics companies will add more to its market cap once they get the humanoids working seamlessly in factories.
And as long as Musk keep saying ‘AGI’ within 1 yr, there is no stopping NVDA.
Imagine if someone gets even a half decent buggy ‘AGI’ working in the next few years, even 10T market cap will not be enough for NVDA.
Oh look a bear 
NVDA is going to use AI to cure cancer, end world hunger and create worldwide peace. Yeah, Jensen Huang will singlehandedly solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict with AI. Needless to say the stock is going to gap up to record highs again tomorrow.
The realization to everyone will come that NVDA will be the last stock to own, to even exist, because NVDA will solve every problem and turn the world in to one big fucking Garden of Eden
That explains why my high school made us learn cisco shit
Ironically Cisco might be a great buy now though hah
Comparing Cisco to NVDA show an extreme lack of tech DD.
Goddam that is so fucking uncanny. You could almost do a word replacement on it. Even the price/sales ratio is close to NVDA. And of course MSFT as still the #2.
Thanks for the share, looks like this got deleted? But appreciated anyway.
What will probably happen is the shitty inflated AI startups all die, and nvidia plateaus bc there is no shitty ai companies to use AI. The apples, metas, amazons, and microsofts don’t really care if AI doesn’t work out and they just have to show that they’re doing something with it. If the bottom of the barrel pulls out, then it’ll probably be an excuse for the big boys to pull out because AI isn’t making any money for them anyways unless you’re like aws, azure, gcp for other shitters to use nvidia chips
I prefer the comparison of NVDA to Enron. Some are claiming NVDA is a big ponzi scheme (look it up). Of course what’s hilarious about this is that NVDA literally replaced Enron in the S&P in 2001 or so (look it up). And while everyone loved CSCO back then, Enron was THE company of the future, a stock you absolutely had to own (again, look it up). Im not saying it will happen – I highly doubt it will happen – but if NVDA turns out to have been a ponzi scheme and the stock goes to 0, like Enron’s did, I will be 100% convinced we’re living in a simulation.
I love NVDA because they make the best GPUs, but for it to be the most valuable publicly traded company in the world essentially overnight is laughable.
Companies can’t even capitalize on AI technology to the point where this even makes any sense.
Microsoft: “I am inevitable”
And then …
Damn, even the # of employees (26K) is similar to Nvidia’s right now!
That’s the obvious comparison to make, imo. It’s not exactly the same because I think demand for Nvidia chips will be very high and they will lead the pack for a while. But they should not be the world’s most valuable company. That will correct itself at some point. They make chips and that’s about it. MSFT and AAPL have numerous profit streams and wide ranging product offerings.
That being said, I’m still adding NVDA. Not a lot at this point but I believe the demand is absolutely real and will continue unabated for the next 12 months at a minimum.
Puts on Nvidia
Bubble wont pop until end of 2026. It will take that long for the AI sensation to die down.
NVDA is still printing money
Isn’t really an apples to apples comparison
Inverse of “Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns”
Steve Ballmer was CEO back then. It’s not that cisco was good, Microsoft was just bad
I remember when Sun Microsystems used to say “80% of internet traffic goes through a Sun server”
Time is a circle
“Tulips surpass gold as the world most valuable material”
Remind Me! 2 years
So how much did Cisco overtake Microsoft by before the crash?
Cisco blundered. They bought Linksys (crap residential stuff), Scientific Atlanta (to be in the home cable business), some desktop residential thing, plus CUSEME. They are THEE TELCO disrupter yet couldn’t really become bigger than the local telcos.
Cisco crashed because the big customers were service providers building out fiber everywhere, and their funding dried up and they canceled orders for Cisco routers. If MSFT/GOOG/META/AMZN cancel their orders same thing will happen to NVDA.
But I doubt that happens anytime soon as they all want to outdo each other in datacenter spending, and they each have the capital to invest. Funding secured.
It’s different this time.
/s?