I will say that companies need to have good salesmen (an women) or they don't make money to pay the engineers.
The problems come in when the bean counters start making decisions based on cost. Cheaper costs do not always result in higher profits. It usually results in lower quality which reflects less value so prices have to come down to keep sales up meaning margins decrease and therefor profits decrease.
I worked for a company that went public because it knew what it was doing and doing it profitably. Then the bean counters came in and sold off half the business and completely changed the company's business model and took the company into doing something it had no clue how to do. Within 6 months, they laid off the project managers and the QA/Testing groups saying that the development teams could do the testing since who knew better how the product was supposed to work, right? And the development leadership could set goals, priorities and manage the process. The management held an all hands meeting and said the next set of lay-offs would only occur when they turned off the lights and locked the doors and not to worry about your job. Less than 7 business days later, they let go the sales team! How do you sell a product if you don't have sales people?!? Their thought process was lets cut costs by getting rid of the sales staff because we have nothing worth of sale and it will take a year of development to get our new product ready so we can hire a new sales team in 6-9 months and train them about our product then.
Oops, people didn't like getting lied to and left in droves and suddenly the company couldn't make progress so the leadership let everyone go a quarter later and broke their lease on the buildings and moved into a small office suite with 4-6 executives and one executive assistant and "kept the business running" for 6 more months until the IPO funds ran out.
While Cisco's ELT is not doing as stupid a job as that company did, they certainly are not delivering on their promises. Every mass reduction, the ELT says they're going to invest the savings into some business priority. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But when the next round comes around, those areas that were supposed to be better aren't.