The death spiral has already started. When a company stops caring about retaining talent and instead focuses exclusively on retaining and hiring the cheapest workforce, then its days are numbered. Cisco might be too big to fail completely, but our best days are without a doubt in the past.
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You're 20 years late, but welcome!
Chambers took Cisco from $82 to $8 and after well over a decade he left Cisco after falling revenue with a stock price of $25 in 2015. He also actively prevented internal development through decades of acquisitions and spinning out development efforts into separate companies only to stop what little internal development Cisco had to "help them over the hump" when they were bought back in with broken trash. He could have gotten that same broken trash for a lot less money by keeping it in house, and perhaps over time with far better management might have grown skills where the result was no longer trash. The attempts to grow new revenue streams from the broken camera company to a generations late tablet to a number of other lesser known and even more foolish products all died a quick and painful deaths. All this was before Chuck.
Chuck inherited an entirely dysfunctional company incapable of development with massive technical debt. The most advanced engineering candidates are not looking to write yet another driver to push around Ethernet frames. Merchant silicon was a growing share of the market making software the long term differentiator. Goto the first sentence of this paragraph. // Getting here was inevitable
AI tailwinds are going to fix everything....EVERYTHING!
Didn't you get the memo?
That was yesterday, now it's Hyper-diaper or something...
AI tailwinds are going to fix everything....EVERYTHING!
Absolutely on spot. Was LR'd in 2017 and consider myself pretty good TAC engineer. Wanted to stay. Hired first by systems integrator after LR because I knew Cisco. Now on third company after LR. The last three jobs I have had have a common theme, understand the company network and migrate their network to either Palo or Fortinet. Really sad for Cisco because I truly loved the old Cisco TAC. If you really know Cisco gear and know how to troubleshoot the classic IP stack with IOS, wireshark; and are willing to learn other vendor gear...there is good money to make by specializing in migrating enterprises off of Cisco. That is my world today, migration. Sad days. Wish they would have let me stay. Cisco, Sometimes your most once loyal allies become the chickens you wish you never hatched, post LR.
Seems like nothing has changed in twenty years. Especially the cries of a death nell for Cisco.
This now inevitable spiral into the ground started more than a decade ago. When Chambers left, it was time to refresh Cisco's value proposition with a new set of unique technical innovation. Unfortunately, the Board decided to "stay the course" with another salesperson in the CEO role.
That was the beginning of the end. The Board seemed to somehow believe that customers would continue to support Cisco's astronomical margins without any incremental value being delivered to them. So many customers around the world and in multiple customer verticals made it clear at that point they were going to look for alternatives if Cisco continued to "stay the course." Either through enormous arrogance or astonishing stupidity, the Board ignored their customers, and the end is now in sight.
@wfn+1skIgAxU
So many pointless overlays
Partner side
A Meraki PAM/ Cisco PAM, why do you need two people for the same role ?
Distribution
Cisco DAM/SMB AM/ specialists/ SAMs
Why do you need 5 touch points to enable the disty to sell a switch
Security
Secure connect/ Meraki?/Umbrella/Stealth watch
Stop comping people differently, pay the umbrella rep on secure connect fairly or maybe get rid of one? Infighting and zero alignment on messaging
Been on calls were umbrella and secure connect reps are fighting
Management
Lord lol bloated heavy ancient chop 🪓🪓🪓
Need to fire all the useless overlay teams getting compensated for doing zero
@vmy+1skIgAxU but who will press that approve button 4 times a day?
@qqc+1skIgAxU so true
Targets get higher
Markets get tougher
Resources are more scarce
I will tell you I had the option of introducing some government to ELT
The customer flat out told me no, it is a waste of time from their previous engagement
Ivory towers in San Francisco me thinks
As a regional manager in sales, I can tell you all I do is try to protect my people from the absolute unending nightmare of BS coming down from the top so that my people can go and be successful. That said most of what you say is true - endless webexes to pump people up while overgoaling the sh*t out of them and cutting their comp plan literally in half. Being told we can't travel because expenses, but ELT is in Italy, France, Africa, every other day. Who's minding the store?
Previous thread is so 150% on the money with reality. Only if ELT was listening and paying attention to turn this big ship around. It already may be too late.
Cisco will prevail. Because "Change is the only constant" and "AI, AI, AI, AI...".
Cisco is circling the drain. The Management layer fat is draining it dry, s-cking life out of it. I'll never understand why they keep laying off technical folks in favour of retaining the worthless 6 layers of management fat. Get rid of the Directors, Sr. directors, VPs, managers, Sr. managers...at least in sales and SE teams - they don't do anything, just click on excel sheets and give speeches on Webex. You never see them anymore on customer calls and workshops. And get rid of the useless BSAs, masquerading as CTOs. A tech company should not need Business Solutiona Architects, SE's do that by default.
Keep the engineers and techies and lose the fat management numpties. This is an engineering and technology company, at least officially. Do due diligence