JDS Uniphase

JDS Uniphase is perhaps most useful to current investors as an object lesson in what happens when a bubble gets wildly out of control. JDSU, as the company likes to refer to itself, lost more than $45 billion in market value in 2001 when the bubble popped. For a company that today has revenues of approximately $1.2 billion, JDS Uniphase represents the worst of the tech bubble.

Today, JDS Uniphase still retains technological leadership in a number of fiber optic research areas critical to the accepted future of telephone and Internet services. While Jim Cramer's recommendation could as easily be read as a red flag as a positive, JDSU is definitely going to benefit from a very real build-out of the nation's fiber optic infrastructure.

JDS Uniphase's best days are well behind it, but so are its worst. The stock is likely to see significant upside over the next decade, but its technology is ultimately going to be relegated to commodity status much like the computer hard drive manufacturers. Numerous telecom stocks are going to out-perform in the near term and the long-term is likely to be dominated by software companies. Hardware manufacturers have enormous fixed costs that simply have no parallel in the software business.