Cisco was the greatest company actually under Chambers and early years of Chuck. Why so? Because we survived the competitions from some Chinese competitors like H and Z, H alone, just one time received 30 billions from their national development bank. Yes, networking equipment is just one branch of theirs, but still there were billions of USD injected into their networking branches. And they sent many ones help them 'get' confidential from other companies. Nortel fell, Motorola fell but we still stand! We should feel proud Cisco survived this national level subsidies. This is not easy. Those wall street people were very stupid to get rid of Chambers.
We need to stick to those good traditions, they will be crucial for us to survive the coming 1930+1972 level Greater Depression. Now the economy is not good and may get worse. Some complain we lost opportunity of cloud, sorry, but we have our own gene and markets. We did well on DCs. We don't need to regret for anything. But we need to insist on those good traditions and spirits which helped us past the difficult years. We need to find new markets where our strengths are. We also need to learn from Microsoft which was in a similar situation like us today.
Cisco is great, not really because every ELT is great, not really because every manager is great but they are good people in this company and the company is not bad at all. I had some very bad ones in my experience, but there are really great ones, and we have good traditions. We can't lose all our hearts. You know why I like this channel, because many Cisco people, even they left Cisco, even they have some bitterness, but we can feel their cares about Cisco, they just express properly on Cisco, not kiss its a** or show resentment. We need to keep every one of those good traditions. They are our compass to the next direction. And now bad things happen everywhere, even we leave Cisco, we still need to face lots of similar challenge. But with those good traditions inside, we have more chances to survive.