In our opinion, the two approaches (value vs growth) are joined at the hip:  Growth is always a component in the calculation of value, constituting a variable whose importance can range from negligible to enormous and whose impact can be negative as well as positive.

Whether appropriate or not, the term "value investing" is widely used.  Typically, it connotes the purchase of stocks having attributes such as a low ratio of price to book value, a low price-earnings ratio, or a high dividend yield.  Unfortunately, such characteristics, even if they appear in combination, are far from determinative as to whether an investor is indeed buying something for what it is worth and is therefore truly operating on the principle of obtaining value in his investments.  Correspondingly, opposite characteristics - a high ratio of price to book value, a high price-earnings ratio, and a low dividend yield - are in no way inconsistent with a "value" purchase.

Similarly, business growth, per se, tells us little about value.  It's true that growth often has a positive impact on value, sometimes one of spectacular proportions.  But such an effect is far from certain.  For example, investors have regularly poured money into the domestic airline business to finance profitless (or worse) growth.  For these investors, it would have been far better if Orville had failed to get off the ground at Kitty Hawk: The more the industry has grown, the worse the disaster for owners.

Let's come back to the Cisco, Microsoft, Rimm, and Nokia. Yes all of them carry a low p/e & p/b, hoard tons of cash, with a decent to great dividend payout. But none of these will automatically qualify itself as a value investment. Why? they all have a growth problem.

It is hard to apply value investing in tech field due to the following reasons:

1. In most cases, tech innovation disrupts the existing markets. It is hard to find any durable moat in high tech field.

2. Changes are fast, you don't have much time to exit once you spot the trend has turned against you.

3. To stay at the top, company must keep innovating at fast speed. Any hiccup in the progression is dangerous 

4. The turnover rate of high tech employees is much higher than other industries. Once the company is labelled as an underdog, good employee swarm out of the door quickly.

It tooks less than couples years for RIMM, and NOKIA from superstars to underdogs. And the price loss is more than 80% from Peak to bottom. Investors who did not response quickly lost their shirts. People who bottom-fished lost their shirts too.

Cisco & Microsoft once looked like invincible from competition, but once they slowed down their innovation, or cloning other people's innovation, they lost their edge quickly.

As far as business growth, companies like LinkedIn & Groupon has huge growth, but most of the growth brought no benefits to investors, at least in short term. Investing in these companies is a speculation by nature.