During the dot-com boom, Cisco was the underlying infrastructure of the Internet. A lot of investors that believed themselves to be savvy bought Cisco stock. Their reasoning was that individual dot-com startups may go under, but the Internet itself was here to stay. In practice, the Cisco stock price peaked in March 2000, and anyone who invested at the peak would not have broken even (in nominal dollars, not real dollars) until December 2025.

The investors were right that the Internet would be important, and that Cisco would continue to be an important manufacturer of networking infrastructure. This just fundamentally did not matter because after the dot-com bubble popped, the market decided that Cisco simply wasn't worth the price it was selling at during the height of the bubble.