PALO ALTO, Calif. (CNN/Money) - Here's some comforting news, culled from the summertime rubber chicken circuit: John Chambers thinks everything will be okay.

Next year.

Of course, he has about as much visibility on that hopeful development as he did on the downturn more than a year ago. That is to say, none.

In a Tuesday speech to a telecommunications trade show in Atlanta (I'll bet it's really hot in Hotlanta!), the CEO of Cisco Systems made the brilliant observation that phone companies won't start spending again on telecommunications equipment until their revenues begin climbing. "The market has returned back to basics," Dow Jones quoted Chambers as saying. "We do think it is a 'show-me' economy, where businesses will spend after they see their own revenues go up."

Philosophers call that a tautological argument. In plain English, it's circular. Customers will begin buying again once people begin buying from them. But it's little more than wishful thinking on Chambers' part that the meaningful uptick will be next year.

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Maybe corporate America -- still busily laying off thousands of workers -- has all the telecommunications service it needs just now, thank you very much. Perhaps the comeback happens in 2004. Or 2005. Or never, at least in a way that's meaningful to the existing crop of gear makers like Cisco (CSCO: Research, Estimates).

Chambers says there was a herd mentality among purchasers of information-technology during the 1990s. He ought to know. From a symbolic perspective, no one did more than Chambers to make CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies feel bad for not understanding the technology their companies were buying. Now that they've bought all the stuff, they don't know quite what to do with it.

It's Come To This Dept, Part I.: The buzz around the southern part of the San Francisco Bay this week is the demise of the 123-year-old San Jose Symphony. It seems the orchestra has next to no valuable assets, so it's shutting its doors.

Hmm. Sounds a lot like many of the much younger startups in the neighborhood. Silicon Valley arts advocates insist this isn't proof that tech-industry types are unsophisticated cretins who can't support a professional orchestra. You draw your own conclusions.

It's Come To This Dept., Part II: A entrepreneur reports that the folks at 2750 Sand Hill Road -- home to high-power venture-capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers -- have taken down prominent signs announcing its address.

Apparently too many tour buses were putting Ground Zero of the venture industry on their agendas, kind of like the tours of the stars' homes in Hollywood. Does anyone really care about seeing where VCs work?

Doing it at Intuit. Somebody apparently forgot to tell the folks at financial-software maker Intuit that there's a tech-stock depression in progress. Shares of the Mountain View-based maker of Quicken and TurboTax, among other popular programs, are up about 4 percent year to date, compared with a sickening 18 percent decline for the Nasdaq composite index.

Intuit (INTU: up $1.43 to $44.43, Research, Estimates) said Tuesday it will pay $92 million in cash for Management Reports, a privately held vendor of software to residential and commercial property managers. The purchase is part of Intuit's push into various niches for professional software, a micro strategy not unlike the macro strategy Microsoft (MSFT: Research, Estimates) is pursuing with its acquisitions of Great Plains and Navision, both makers of software targeting small businesses. Expect more from Intuit. As of April 30, it had $455 million in cash, $1.3 billion in short-term investments and another $48 million in marketable securities, giving it a $1.8-billion war chest.

Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at adam_lashinsky@timeinc.com.

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