Worth Watching: How Tech Firms Come to Terms With Their Own Missteps

When John Chambers, the Cisco Systems (CSCO Quote) CEO who has lately been doing pro bono work as Silicon Valley's whiner-in-chief, began talking this winter about how the U.S. economy had entered recession, a lot of people stood up and took notice.

This was Chambers, after all, the inveterate optimist whose company was pretty much the symbol of the New Economy. Cisco was supposed to be bulletproof, the outfit that made the stuff that everybody couldn't afford not to have. If Cisco was feeling the effects of the U.S. downturn, things had to be bad.

"It makes no difference what the Federal Reserve or the latest statistics say," Chambers told the Swedish newspaper Finantidningen in February. "What we see now is absolutely not a soft landing. Ask anyone in American manufacturing industry and they will say that we are in a recession." ...