Watch the trend.
A cycle of constantly lowered expectations. The executives that brought point success leave in frustration.
Numbers-only Chuck presides over a culture of constant layoffs since he took over. Keeps numbers only culture people with no focus on growth or innovation on to eek out pennies of profits out of terminally thick business models.
Basically Chuck is setting up the company to be acquired by Lenovo by 2022 (for some reason Lenovo remains a "good" company).
Interesting thread.
No new innovation? We acquire companies and sell their products.
Cisco might market itself as a tech company, but we are a glorified Staples or Best Buy.
At least John would tout his "30 market adjacencies" and "I am afraid we are not moving fast enough" mantras to fire up the troops. Chuck seems devoid of that talent for projecting a vision of where the business is going, as he is a "mathematician".
Chuck inherited what Chambers started. And made no effort to make things any different or better. No new innovation no matter what they say. And layoffs only becoming more frequent. Hate to say it, things will only get worse and go downhill from here. Have never seen morale so low. And CX - a total disaster.
The day will come all of the sudden.
Lenovo?
nah.
Google?
hmm
there is no IP, everything can be done with commercial silicon. Arista delivers on better network performance without proprietary ASICS and now the majority of Cisco products use COTS silicon, the only differentiator is the IOS CLI many network engineers know... but that is dying quickly. When I asked a top Cisco DE what to lwarbya few years back, they said "ignore IOS, get Linux Foundation certified"
Huawei screwed us big time.
They already stole all of the IP
Selling off to a Chinese company sounds ridiculous. There is too much IP to send off to China.
Clearly someone was having a bad night, but all in all it makes perfect sense. With the current focus on pure management on margins and numbers, selling off chunks of business while they still command value makes sense. In 5 years tops the routing and switching business will be worthless, so while not sell with that insight in mind while Cisco still commands leading market share? Many companies in hindsight wish they'd sold out earlier while they were still relevant. Despite all the talk about subscription and software, Cisco is still completely dependent on hardware sales in switching and routing. It can't wean itself off that. And that market is free falling into commodization.
Sell to Google.
Don't know about Lenovo, but the observation that they could be packaging for a sale or divestment of business units to "unlock the value" to shareholders seems very possible. And they shed expensive employees in the process of preparing. It's not about growth and investment any more. It's about the stock price only. Very plausible, IMHO.
Are you okay???
Basically Chuck is setting up the company to be acquired by Lenovo by 2022 (for some reason Lenovo remains a "good" company).
Source?