Some of you may find it hard to believe that Cisco was a tech darling couple of decades ago. It was one of the four horsemen of technology in the late 1990s. It was as respected as technology pioneers like Apple are today. Cisco was the leading equipment provider for managing the flow of information traffic over the Internet. During its golden days, in early 2000, shares of Cisco traded for approx. $80 a share as profits were consistently surging.

Cisco shares have been trading for approx. $20 a share for almost a decade now.

In my opinion, every technology company in its journey, once they peak, has a “moment.” This is the moment where they are standing at the crossroads. They are established leaders in their category and have a strong dominance. But ever since they probably established their category, competitors have been emerging and at this point, are making decent dents. Product differentiation in technology is becoming increasingly complex, and this is more so a case when it comes to hardware.

When these companies have such a moment, the crossroads diverges into two paths. One path is the comfort zone path. They keep doing what they are good at. This strategy is akin to a quote from Commissioner Gordon in the movie “The Dark Knight Rises”: “When structures become shackles…”. The expertise becomes a shackle. The other path is to understand what is emerging on the horizon and channel your core competency into these areas as well.

Take a moment to think- If a company that dominated information flow and security across industries and geographies entered the cloud business a couple of decades ago, there was no one to stop it from being the dominant player. Remember that in the early years of cloud, information security concerns were a major bottleneck in cloud adoption. If Cisco system offered a cloud solution, backed by its security capabilities, there was no stopping it.

Cisco still exists. It now has a cloud business as well. I don’t want to comment on why its current cloud business strategy and positioning is flawed, since we want to now transition to the core of this article. The gist is, Cisco had a moment, and it fumbled.

Last few months have been abuzz with news articles criticizing Apple for being a laggard in its AI strategy. Apple’s current position is very similar to what Cisco was in late 1990s. Apple is having a moment, but is it going to be a Cisco moment?

Not in my opinion.

My opinion is that what Apple is adopting is what I like to call strategic laggardness. And if the strategy I believe they are executing is their actual strategy, they are going to create a few new categories.

Apple has a firm grip on consumer electronics, with their iPhone user base. If they can push LLM and deep learning-enabled capabilities to these edge devices, there will be an explosion in revenue streams it can generate. Watch the 39th episode of “Think About It” for more insights.