The Bloor Perspective: Cisco inferno, EU shelves spam, and Dell gets all premature

If we go back to August 2000, we were lavishing praise upon Cisco for its ability to keep on turning in excellent financial figures. Last week, however, it revealed its latest results and they fell short of analysts' expectations.

Of course, it's all relative. This apparent failure by Cisco is founded upon revenues that only managed to increase by 55 per cent and profits were only $1.33bn for the second quarter compared with $897m in the corresponding period last year. The problem for analysts is that this profit was only 18 cents per share while they were expecting a mighty 19 cents. The effects on stock prices were interesting. Stocks rose a small amount in the US before falling in Europe.

It is claimed that Cisco hardware is used to carry 70 per cent of the traffic on the internet. As long as the web keeps growing - and there is every sign that it will - Cisco can have few doubts about future success. The only issue is whether it can keep up with the ever-increasing demands of financial analysts and shareholders.

Back in August, the claim was that Cisco is rarely caught out by changes in the marketplace. Some would argue that this is not the case this time. Ultimately, what does it matter if Cisco doesn't quite match up to a third party's guesswork? In real terms, there may be a significant difference that comes about from a penny per share but it doesn't seem to be worth getting heated about.

Cisco has not become a bad business over a period of a few months. What is more, it is not as if it has only made a small profit for its shareholders to divide up.

The European Union (EU) has been casting its eye over the issues of unsolicited email and digital copyright this week. The conclusions that it has drawn up are supposed to steer a middle course between the interests of businesses and individuals but this strategy is likely to achieve nothing.

The EU report indicates that around £6bn is wasted each year in handling junk email, known as spam. Last July it voted to support 'permission-based' marketing by email but this does not apply to spam.

Permission-based marketing ensures that marketing messages are transmitted only to individuals who have explicitly authorised them by providing an email address or expressing an interest.

For some reason, spam is treated differently and many countries across the region still operate an 'opt-out' requirement where individuals can be sent as much junk mail as a sender likes until they opt out. Despite this, it appears the EU will favour the opt-out approach to controlling spam.

As far as email marketing goes, there are very few legitimate businesses that don't already work on a permission-based system. It is only the spammers who persistently infringe the privacy of individuals and, yet, the EU chooses to do nothing to curb their activities. Even ISPs are beginning to see the need to reduce volumes of spam so isn't it time the EU did a little to help?

Once again it appears that our European lawmakers have gone to a lot of effort to come up with a 'do nothing' strategy. It seems to be an attempt to be seen to be considering the issues while not wishing to change anything.

After only a few months, Dell has decided to close its B2B exchange at dellmarketplace.com. It seems that it failed to find any new partners to support the original grouping of Dell, 3M, Motorola and Pitney Bowes. So what went wrong? Was it just a case of Dell being too far ahead of mainstream thinking?

The Dell Marketplace was supposed to build up a community that would help Dell to source components for its PC systems and then to sell them on. Clearly, this idea was going to need businesses to identify the exchange as a useful place to invest time and effort. This failure can be seen to be a sign that the whole concept of B2B exchanges is still very immature and there has to be a lot more behind them - they can't just be based on a neat idea.

Dell was caught out because a market trend carried it away. It got into the idea of B2B exchanges too early and without a plan. Just like dot-coms a year ago, it has found that moving forward in this way is a recipe for disaster.

However, it is a big business and it can afford to take risks such as these. Compaq, Gateway and HP make up another group of PC suppliers that have created their own exchange and, so far, there is little indication it is taking off in the way the partners expect.

It would appear Dell was just too quick off the mark. Instead of developing partnerships that would enable it to carry out its own business it jumped a few stages and went straight for the complete, open marketplace. At a time when most businesses are still trying to work out how they can make efficient use of web technology within their own supply chains, Dell was never really going to get much interest. But the idea was a good one and will work in the future. Let's hope that Dell thinks so too.