The Globe and Mail has a stinging article on Cisco’s earnings and it is a must read, for much of the stuff which appeaed in the US media was tepid at best.

bq. Also on the glass-is-half-empty side of the picture, Cisco’s cash flow from operations — that is, the money it made from its actual business, rather than its stock portfolio or other assets — fell in the quarter to $973-million from $1.1-billion. The “book to bill” ratio, which measures the number of new orders, was also somewhat less than rosy. It came in below 1, which means that Cisco’s business shrank rather than grew.