In the summer of 2000, Solectron's Shah had customers from every corner begging for more manufacturing capacity. Even so, his forecasts were slowly diverging from his networking partners', including Cisco. His were less optimistic, based on what he saw in the general economy. There were meetings about it, but nothing was resolved about the growing disparity between what Shah and his customers thought was happening and what Cisco said was happening.

"You try to talk it over. Sometimes it doesn't work. Can you really sit there and confront a customer and tell him he doesn't know what he's doing with his business? The numbers might suggest you should. At the same time," Shah laughs, trying to picture it, "I'd like to see someone in that conference room doing it."

Here, the very core of Cisco's infrastructure - its much-vaunted outsourced manufacturing model - worked against the company, according to M Eric Johnson, an associate professor of business administration and a supply chain expert at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. Cisco's partners were simply not as invested in delivering a loud wake-up call, as an in-house supplier would have been.

"The outsourced model is a given, and it's done some wonderful things," Johnson says. "But Solectron has to watch their own business. It maters less to them if Cisco's numbers look off. Plus, they don't want to go tell a customer they're wrong. Whereas if it were in-house, some low-level inventory manager might have spoken up and said: ‘Look, this isn't going to fly', because he has more of an incentive to [help] his company."

Shah also says it would have been presumptuous to confront a company like Cisco and tell it it was wrong. When had Cisco ever been wrong? But now Shah thinks that over-reliance on the forecasting technology led people to undervalue human judgement and intuition, and inhibited frank conversations among partners.

On top of that, there's the possibility that despite what Fortune said, Cisco's supply chain was not quite as wired as was hyped; Cisco, Solectron and others do plenty of business with companies that still fax data. Some customers simply won't cater to the advanced infrastructure, making it harder to collect and aggregate information.

"Cisco has hundreds of these huge customers who aren't going to procurement the way Cisco wants them to," Network Architects' Dzubeck says. "Things like end-to-end EDI, standards, they have to occur. Cisco's further along, but there's a lot to do to make the infrastructure complete."