After chambers same cr^ap all over again. Stop hiring self promoting salesman as CEOs if you want any future for a company.
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Chambers was so desperate for the "next big thing" that he went back outside Cisco to the Mario, Prem, Luca, Soni (MPLS) spin-in well one too many times. Their brainchild was Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI), a much more complicated networking framework based on proprietary Cisco hardware.
Of course, at the time, the industry was hyping Software Defined Networking (SDN) an open networking paradigm which was in response to Cisco's inability to deliver a comprehensive operations model for the overly complex Cisco portfolio. SDN never reached the promise customers were hoping for, but ACI was never widely installed in customer networks. The end result was that customers realized that there was little innovation left in the networking space which was the beginning of the end of Cisco's growth phase.
The big question is why Cisco ignored all of the other growth opportunities in adjacent tech spaces. Ultimately, it came down to the sales forces' inability to do anything other than sell networking hardware. In fact, Chambers turned down an opportunity to buy VMWare, in its early days, because he didn't think his sales force could sell software. This led several groups to leave Cisco and form new companies.
Ultimately, Cisco had optimized the entire company and its very successful partner program around delivering Cisco networking hardware. Despite the obvious need to expand into other technology spaces, Cisco just couldn't pull the trigger. It's why Cisco is now in managed decline and is extremely focused on cost reduction.