Cisco Announcement Gets No Pop: Today's Outrage

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Cisco's(CSCO) much-hyped announcement turned out to be a super fast Internet router as expected.

The stock got no pop despite Cisco's Apple-like pre-announcement buzz campaign. Hours after unveiling Cisco's next-generation router, the company's shares were still in the red, though recently the stock ticked up 8 cents to $26.22 -- still a ways from the $80 mark back in 2000.

So much for borrowing from Apple's (AAPL) marketing playbook.

Cisco's enticingly cryptic pre-announcements foretold a revelation that would "forever change the Internet."

No doubt Cisco didn't like getting upstaged last month by Google's (GOOG) announcement that it was testing ultra high-speed broadband networks with speeds Google claimed would be 100 times faster than what most Americans experience online today.

The buzz campaign almost worked. Google Trends showed that "Cisco" lit up the charts yesterday and "Cisco Announcement" is back on the search engine's list of "Hot Topics" today.

That's pretty heady stuff for a company that makes the backend equipment that rarely gets the kind of buzz that front-end toys like Apple's iPad tend to generate. Just yesterday, Apple shares hit a new record after debuting its TV ads for the iPad during the Oscars.

Cisco shares also surged to a two-year record yesterday ahead of today's big news, but it seems that once again investors bought the hype and sold the news.

It just goes to show, it's hard to match Apple in the buzz factor.

It's not that we don't want a 100-Gigabit router that can deliver all the movies ever made in just four minutes.

It's just hard to get excited about a piece of technology that most consumers will never see.

Nice try, Cisco.

--Written by Glenn Hall in New York.

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