Chellam at Xilinx attributes Cisco's failure to act expeditiously to the fact that its software ignored such macroeconomic factors as debt levels, economic spending, interest rates, the bond market and so forth, while trusting data freighted with growth biases. In short, the virtual close and forecasting didn't include the right economic indicators.

"They missed the shift," Chellam says flatly. "They were focused on what their customers were ordering. No one looked at the macroeconomic factors overshadowing the entire communications industry and spoke up. Someone should have said: ‘These orders can't be sustained'."

Chellam has created a task force at Xilinx to develop software that injects more macroeconomic indicators into his forecasts. He considers it the key ingredient missing across the networking supply chain. "I can't rely on just what Cisco tells me," he says. "We're developing leading indicators that are more macro in nature. Information that comes through banking, Wall Street, debt levels and economic spending - they're not intuitively related to me directly, but they have an effect." In essence, Chellam is attempting to draw a more detailed map than the one Cisco used to navigate the future. It is still, however, a map, not the territory itself.

He's also building a virtual close system, based largely on Cisco's. "Forgetting their failure to look at [macroeconomic] factors, I still think Cisco's use of the Internet is an asset," Chellam says. "But tools like the virtual close are secondary to [human judgement] decision, to process improvements. The virtual close can get better.

Cisco is making the virtual close and its demand forecasting better, Solvik says. But it's not clear how. As vague as Chambers sounded in May when promising a return to 30 per cent to 50 per cent growth sometime in the future, Solvik similarly doesn't provide many specifics for how Cisco is updating its infrastructure.

Solvik does say that the next step in its virtual supply chain is to create much-needed visibility into all levels of the networking industry. What he calls the new network supply chain will also allow the company to communicate with all networking-related companies and even see data passed between two other companies in the chain. Also, he says Cisco is updating its forecasting software, enhancing each business unit's forecasting capabilities.

One area Solvik is specific about is macroeconomic. He argues against its wide use, despite what Chellam says about the role of big-picture data. Solvik thinks the economy is too complex to get anything meaningful out of such broad numbers as gross domestic product or interest rates. "We can't put a judgement across the entire supply chain. Look at the economy today. Consumer confidence is up, and capital indicators sunk again. It's pretty darn complex," Solvik says, with perhaps a new appreciation for the limitations of his software.

But Cisco still wants to attribute its recent problems to uncontrollable forces, as if the historic $US2.2 billion inventory write-off and the steep decline of the company's stock had nothing to do with the men at the top or the systems they trusted.

"If we could look backward, I know there are a lot of things we'd do," Solvik says. "If we had a crystal ball . . . I just can't predict how we might have reacted if we had insight into these things we didn't know."

By intimating that only magic could have saved Cisco, Solvik is seconding CFO Carter's sarcastic comment to the Financial Times in April, "The slowdown happened at Internet speed," Carter said. "We're developing a new module for our system right now. It's called a crystal ball."

But some people don't believe a crystal ball was what Cisco needed. The ability to look away from the computer screen and out the window to see the rain coming down just might have sufficed.