Cisco was the quintessential dot-com bubble company. Back then, it was what Nvidia is today: at the very spearhead of investors rallying behind the Internet.
"Good company" is subjective, but to argue that the company that built the backbone of modern web didn't make anything novel or monetizable is a bit short-sighted, don't you find?
And if you'd invested in Cisco then, it would have gone very badly for you. It was _wildly_ overvalued; at peak it had a P/E ratio of ~200 (even Nvidia's only about 50).
"Good company" is subjective, but to argue that the company that built the backbone of modern web didn't make anything novel or monetizable is a bit short-sighted, don't you find?