Chapter 41 foreword

At the beginning of 1994, my colleague Professor Li Xing from Tsinghua University told me that Wei Yu, the Vice Minister of Education at that time, proposed to establish the Internet for educational and scientific research institutions. This was the beginning of the Internet in China.Soon China sent a delegation including Wu Jianping, Li Xing and other Chinese scholars who studied the Internet the earliest to the United States to investigate the Internet and inspect companies that produce Internet equipment, mainly routers.At that time, the equipment from Cisco (Cisco) in the United States was quickly ordered, and the goods arrived soon.In a short period of time, China's own earliest Internet was born in universities (although the Institute of High Energy was connected to the Internet earlier, it was actually a subnet of the Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Laboratory). At that time, almost no one knew This Cisco company, even today, because Cisco's products are not directly oriented to users, people who know it are far less than those who know McDonald's, even though Cisco is three times as big as McDonald's.However, if you tell everyone that there would be no Internet today without the routers produced by Cisco and similar companies, then everyone will know the role of Cisco in our lives.Cisco is a leader in the standard network era. It rose with the emergence of the Internet and once declined with the bursting of its bubble.In 2000, Cisco surpassed Microsoft in an instant and became the company with the highest stock value in the world ($540 billion). At that time, the trading volume of Cisco stock in one day exceeded that of the entire Chinese stock market at that time. After 9/11, its stock once shrank by 85%.That year, Cisco's CEO Chambers announced the only major layoff in Cisco's history. At the same time, he reduced his salary to one dollar a year, becoming the lowest paid CEO in the world.This approach was once passed on as a good story, and it was followed by those bosses who were willing to share weal and woe with the company.Today, a few years later, Cisco has come out of the bottom and has become the world's largest equipment manufacturing company.