Cisco has been clueless for awhile. The people who want speed don’t trust them to do basic network stacks, they want to do something more complicated?
The HFT industry noticed Cisco was messing with routing stacks, and you can essentially look to the entire market cap of Arista as a direct result. Specifically people wanting to avoid the headaches of the nexus line (EOS is nice!).
They are the victims of their own success to the point they long ago cannibalized actual product innovation. A lot of the industry still wants their certs, but nobody I know who values speed (local stripped back switches) or stability/availability (AWS and minimal office equipment) would chose them for much. A lot of the purchases are from big players with long contracts, the “Nobody got fired for IBM” of network equipment.
This just screams moving deck chairs on the Titanic.