Cisco could absolutely not compete in cloud. They are like at least a decade behind the competition.
As stated nearing an infinite number of times, IBM and Oracle have the systems, scaling and application experience that Cisco never had and they have tiny single digit shares of cloud.
I gave your reply an upvote but it's not simply a matter of time. A decade of focused effort would likely yield nothing because the cloud is built on commodity equipment and being able to manage everything, and after decades Cisco couldn't manage their own equipment in house. As many have posted on this site over the years, the non-network IT is held together with bailing wire and chewing gum and if the person with the gum leaves the associated services require a massive effort to stabilize. This is not a viable foundation for cloud.
As for salary cuts, the code I checked in worked and when I checked it years later it was unchanged, so it provided sufficient functionality, performance and quality the first time. Given that most produce cr-p which needs most of the development budget to fail in the attempts to "fix" why should I and my family suffer to pay for people wasting my time helping them fix their code instead of allowing me to do new quality work? The world isn't just performers and deadwood, it's those that are net negative in their total contribution far beyond just the salary Cisco loses on each piece of deadwood. Cisco has far more net negative contributors than anyone is willing to acknowledge.