Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Cisco could have doubled its stock price during the pandemic, but it gave the market away to Zoom after years of constant layoffs.

It appears Zoom never reached ttm revenue of even $5B and has been nearly flat for years. Net income has been growing, but it's market cap is just over 8% of Cisco's. Cisco is not doubling its stock price on any of this at any point in the past 5 years.

The irony is Zoom is worth about what Cisco paid for Splunk and has better revenue and earnings numbers than Splunk had when it was acquired. Don't bother imagining if Cisco could have executed on the plan of Zoom's CEO when he worked for Cisco - even if Cisco tried they would not have executed nearly as well.

Webex is good when it comes to video meetings. Video quality is good and the noise cancellation is really good too. However, the messaging part of the product is total garbage. It’s not competitive at all with products like slack. It’s pretty wild how many feature requests internally have been floating around for YEARS. IS ANYONE HOME OVER THERE???? 😂

@1vx I still laugh every time I use Zoom. It's a complete knockoff of Webex.....but no surprise since it was ex-Webex folks that created Zoom. All Cisco had to do was create a "Webex-lite" product and blast it out to consumers. Cisco would have become the household name that Zoom got.

Ah, dynamicsoft.....I worked with that team. Very smart group of people with a successful product, but Cisco flushed their product like everything else.
And yeah, the whole pandemic/Zoom thing baffled me. Cisco could have spent one day of labor repackaging Webex for consumers......but NO....we might pi-s off our enterprise customers. That was Cisco's biggest waste of an opportunity in their entire existence.

Cisco thought it could forcibly enter the consumer market with the Umi...

Timed perfectly for the extreme rise in texting. Even in Cisco if you called people they screamed to use IM.

• 1 on miss during pandemic.

It's funny and tragic...Cisco thought it could forcibly enter the consumer market with the Umi (greatest product flop of all time), but when a golden opportunity across nearly every market segment on the planet including consumers landed in Cisco's lap for Webex (+phones & headsets) during the pandemic, they're like 'naaaaah, - we good".

Cisco will just have to wait until the next global lockdown, which I guess should be coming up soon based on the roadmap.

Whilst G2 leads engineering and platforms Cisco is fu---d. The clown is a politician and doesn’t know a router from a house brick. He fu---d up collab from a once dominant market position and let Zoom and MS park tanks on the Cisco lawn. He did same with security and he’ll now do the same in EN.

Shouda Coulda Woulda

As a Webex employee at the time of acquisition, Cisco treated employees terribly and drove out the best talent. Then the pandemic hit and the ELT stood aside and watched zoom eat their lunch. Many of the ex-webexers went to zoom and now are retired. They’re far better off.

Since I left Cisco, I now do consulting and I can’t find Webex used anywhere. Cisco threw away the market share Webex had.

To the OGs still working in Webex, it’s hard to watch. Wishing you all well!

And yet they still host WebexOne conference not just in US, but in Germany and India. Can they simply not add WebexOne to Cisco Live since it is a customer conference after all and avoid this unnecessary expense? This is nothing but a boondoggle for Webex BU heads along with session presenters with same material every year and they know it given the market share loss every year in Collaboration, specifically Webex.

Collab does not matter. Other BU's will send this stock >100 by Apr 1. Document this.

Effective management requires the ability to assess and apply talent. Look at all the PhDs it hired with experience applicable to groups to which they weren't assigned and then bug fixed code they knew nothing about until they quit months later.

Effective management also needs to understand what will best serve their customers. OP mentions Zoom as a competitor but for those that don't know the guy who founded Zoom came into Cisco as a VP through the WebEx acquisition and proposed that a set of features he though were valuable be done at Cisco. He was turned away and went off to found Zoom.

Cisco is an acquisition company which wasted most of its development budget on bug fixing hasn't been able to do any of these things for decades and until the financials make it impossible to keep failing like this there is no incentive to change.

Ah Dynamicsoft, a name I haven't heard of in years. Their main tech guy Rosenberg is >now at Five9 doing AI stuff. Five9 stupidly turned down a acquisition bid from Zoom. >Imagine if Cisco bought Five9? Fresh layoff meat.

Ah, TMR - three stooges that essentially destroyed Webex and inspired Eric Yuan to go out to do it again with ZOOM. "R" was so pepsinated to create a Slack replacement with SPARK. It functionality turned out to be a joke. Multiple Execs after TMR cannot fix it, even with the perfect storm on the pandemic cannot help (it helped ZOOM).

Now, the Collab is just a tail-spin to end game. Very Sad.

"Collaboration"? Cisco was never in danger of creating anything like Slack or Github. Stay in your lane - white metal boxes with blinking lights on them.

Poor leadership is everywhere in Cisco. Too many sub-standard boomerangs coming back to vest in peace while being given VP positions like they're for free.