Once upon a time, I was part of the Collab team...but left Cisco 6 years ago in a different BU.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I thought "wow, what an awesome opportunity for Webex". As Zoom grew and outshined Cisco, I could do nothing but bang my head on my desk. I know why the ELT did it......they thought their precious large Enterprise customers would get mad if Cisco had a "lite" Webex version for free. But it would have locked the Cisco name firmly in regular consumers' minds.....which is invaluable....you very rarely have the opportunity to do that. Not leveraging Webex to regular consumers during the pandemic was Cisco's #1 missed opportunity of the last 20+ years. Such a waste.
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Webex has always been horribly run. They have the d-mbest employees out of all the DBUs along with the worst security
How can you say you are a software subscription based company and you let the biggest software subscription offering you have go down the drain? If there ever was an opportunity to rule them all, Cisco let that crisis go to waste. Colossal fail.
What's happened to Webex is terrible. I left when MSFT and Zoom started eating our lunch, then the pandemic and zoom took over....its sad.
Cisco just stepped aside and let them, didn't pivot to compete during the pandemic. That's on Chuck and Gerri.
The end started long before that when Rowan took over and wanted to be the next Steve Jobs or Elon....he wasn't. Cisco has given away the small/med business and now MSFT is chomping away at the enterprise. The Webex BU has amazing people who have passion. While cuts may be healthy to keep the BU thriving....what Cisco is doing isn't going to help us gain back market share.
To the folks hit today, I'm sorry. You deserve better. My hope is this generous package you're receiving is a spring board to a new job where you will be appreciated.
Sad day for the webex group, poor execution, the group at the top should be held accountable not the people operating this business. 2020 was wide open for this product to go to the moon but it’s going straight to the dumpster.
It was known collaboration is a sinking BU so while I'm sorry yall on the webex team got LRd you can't really be that surprised. I'm wishing yall nothing but the best going forward.
Eric proudly grew the team from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to $750M+
Just got laid off from webex too, got the 1:1 from my manager and bo-m "your role is now being closed"
wrong, everyone knows Eric Yuan built webex