Cisco has been circling the drain for a long, long time (far longer than Arista). They are close in mold to IBM with declining revenue offset by managed profits

Cisco has been circling the drain for a long, long time (far longer than Arista). They are close in mold to IBM with declining revenue offset by managed profits from periodic layoffs and outsourcing. Cisco would continually find ways to cut employee perks. They thought their thing was software consulting but they couldn't/wouldn't compete for talent with the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Note that Google really hit its stride in the early 2000s. That is a good 13 years ago. People at Cisco knew even then. People would game the system by starting companies to be bought by Cisco and then quiting and repeating the process. A long time employee I knew set his price target at $30 and I think sold at least a large chunk when it temporarily hit that. My impression was that there were many slackers at the company. A company mostly concerned with internal politics... much like IBM... presentations with org charts reminding me of my co-op time at IBM where people talked mostly about whom was the boss of whom... especially important since for Cisco, layoffs sometimes seemed to hit whole groups.