It has nothing to do with people
Industry trends are thinning markets out...enterprise shift to cloud , cloud titans going white box, SP not buying much except in some cases like reliance jio
On sw side the scale and complexity coupled with beehive cell type pi pd team boundaries make it very hard to see the big picture of any change or get teams to work together. Managers are scared of high mttr affecting their evals.
On hw side company is not investing much. Infact hw teams have been hit for a long time now with cuts and mergers
What csco will become none can predict...my guess is a 20billion profitable co with half the current staffing. Then a investor and board directed split into hw and sw cos.