Cisco, H-P Tablet, Slate: Weekly Tech Recap

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The talking heads of Cisco (CSCO) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) couldn't distract investors long enough to remedy tech stocks' bad week.

Tech watchers put lots of hope into bellwether Cisco and its fiscal fourth quarter earnings report Wednesday, but they seemed less than impressed when greeted with the company's cautious outlook.

Recognizing waning IT spending, Chambers said the decrease in customers' tech orders in late June and early July was "a mixed signal pattern that we haven't seen before."

Cisco CEO John Chambers

Cisco reported a nice profit and beat EPS by a penny, but it just missed revenue predictions, coming in at $10.84 billion instead of the $10.88 billion analysts wanted. "We had very good results with 27% growth in revenue for the quarter," CFO John Calderoni told TheStreet. "But we did have a couple of weeks that really just signal that there is a little bit of concern in the overall environment with what's happening from an economic standpoint."

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Cisco's results, which sent its stock down 10%, had a domino effect for the rest of the sector, deepening the tech selloff and helping the Nasdaq dive by more than 65 points.

A barrage of analysts downgraded Cisco Thursday. On Friday, chip makers like Broadcom (BRCM) and Marvell (MRVL) felt the sting instigated by Cisco and saw their shares drop in intraday trading Friday.

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Cisco's share price, down more than 11% since last week, closed flat on Friday at $21.36. Broadcom closed down nearly 3% to $31.93, Marvell closed down 1.02% to $14.51, and the Nasdaq shed 17 points to 2173.

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After a tablet-developing hiatus, H-P's back in the game. "H-P is very excited about the slate category," an H-P spokesman said in an email to TheStreet late Friday. "H-P plans to use webOS from its recent Palm acquisition as well as Windows 7 from Microsoft for this category. WebOS products will span across smartphones, slates, netbooks and printers. Deployment of the Windows 7 slate will target the specific needs of select enterprise markets."

Friday's blogosphere chatter of H-P's slate device, code-named Hurricane and reportedly launching in the first quarter of 2011, was probably a welcome relief from the H-P headlines that dominated earlier in the week.

Since dismissing its CEO Mark Hurd, H-P's board said it was surprised by Hurd's attempts to defend his reputation, Oracle (ORCL) chief Larry Ellison slammed H-P's board for how it handled Hurd's resignation, a Connecticut law firm filed a shareholder derivative lawsuit against H-P and -- lastly -- the Department of Justice is asking H-P to provide internal records in an international bribery investigation.

Still no comment from H-P on when it expects to name its new CEO.

H-P's stock, which is down 3.35% since last week, gained 0.77% to close at $40.45 Friday.

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