"We did not agree as crisply as we should have on strategy, what was our architecture to get there, and then what is our multiple phase road map to get there," Chambers said at the time. "You'll see us go back to the basics and consolidate collaboration under one group and prioritize what we want to do or not."
These proclamations came shortly after Cisco killed its Cius collaboration tablet computer only two months after it began shipping.
In Advanced Services, Cisco may just have simply overshot the market. Every product announcement was accompanied by a related array of new services offerings. And in the face of cautious spending and global economic challenges, if customers are not buying products they most likely are not buying the services to integrate them.
Linksys continues to wear the consumer albatross at Cisco. Cisco all but gutted its consumer operations last year amid disappointing sales and integration and execution strategies. It killed two highly visible products after splashy introductions, laid off 550 people in that unit alone, yet pledged to stick by Linksys and make it a more integral and profitable component of its core strategy.
And then Cisco experienced the Linksys cloud snafu of two weeks ago in which it forced a firmware upgrade on users of its EA line of routers, held them in a Cisco Connect Cloud configuration service, and said it would monitor customer activity to uphold service terms and conditions.
This week's layoffs may be the chicken coming home to roost for that Linksys strategy error.
Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.
