For a month in early 2000 Cisco Systems, the Internet router king, became the most valuable company on Earth. Its market cap topped $500 billion, as the Nasdaq Composite index soared past 5000. Today the Nasdaq is around 2700. If Cisco's shares had kept pace the company would be worth $270 billion. But Cisco's market cap is a mere $84 billion. Even as Cisco has grown to $40 billion in revenue and assembled a bombproof balance sheet with $55 billion in assets, the router king has lost two-thirds of its relative value on the Nasdaq since early 2000. Markets can be wrong, of course, and Cisco's shares may be a steal. But the market is saying that Cisco is being squeezed by two rivals--at the volume end by China-based Huawei and at the performance end by Juniper Networks ($4.1 billion in revenue in 2010, with a $22 billion market cap). Juniper was started in 1996 by Pradeep Sindhu, a scientist at the fabled Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.