Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

I heard that another LR massive layoff coming in March, CX will be on spotlight again.

I recall the days of the old sonet mailing list. Some real gurus used to teach there. Very learned and willing to share.

Late 90s to early 2000s classic Cisco was email alias “flaming”, for internal product / TAC tech support. People would post researched questions to mailer aliases, and the alias owners would make usually make good effort to assist you in resolving the issue. Your responsibility was to properly research the issue, and ask a well thought out purposeful question. Failure to research or ask a well thought question would often result in a snippy remark or candid questioning of your logic. People learned, were candid, and sometimes were perhaps slightly embarrassed when they didn’t follow directions of the subject matter experts. Nowadays, most would potentially look for a safe-space or be offended by such candid feedback. Times have changed. Being innovative sometimes takes having thick skin, the days of the mailer alias flame, and quick innovation and resolution, and the diving customer catch are long gone.

Cisco used to be the big dog in moving packets from A to B. They had the ASICs, the chassis, and the software. They were close to their customers and implemented the features the customers needed to build the networks they envisioned. Cisco's leadership was unquestioned, and it got to the point where CIOs asked Cisco to tell them what to buy. Nobody got fired for buying Cisco, and if I build a network the way Cisco tells me to, it will work great and my boss will think I'm a star.

Then their leadership in ASICs started to wane, and they started to move to 3rd party off-the-shelf chips. Then competitors caught up. Then networking boxes became a commodity.

Think of Cisco like Microsoft: one of the good things about Microsoft was their focus on backwards compatibility, which meant everything to businesses through the 90s. But then each advance became harder due to the need to maintain that compatibility. Cisco suffer a similar fate. New innovations break older networks, and suffer from customer inertia (don't fix what isn't broken) whereas new entrants and competitors don't have that problem.

With the leadership in enterprise and SP networking diminishing, Cisco attempted to move higher in the stack, with services and other devices. Their device experiments have mostly failed - even the startups that had mindshare when bought, were ruined.

Now it's a software-centric world, and Cisco don't have it in their DNA. Everything fails, and it's frankly embarrassing.

Question to people still at Cisco: Which BUs are still innovating and producing good products?