"Instead of axing 6,000 people, why not axe some of the useless overpaid upper management? "
Or (and here's an idea), why not get real about product prices.
I recently spent £75k with Huawei(*) for switches which are significantly more powerful and flexible than Cisco were offering for 3-5 times that figure (more, once you realised that several features that we wanted were standard in the Huawei kit and "added value items" in the Ciscos)
I've been extremely impressed with Huawei's tech support guys in Romania too.
Commodity Silicon (mainly Broadcom's Trident and friends) is eating Cisco's high end market. Cisco are even using it in their Nexus switches, but still trying to pretend they develop their own asics and pricing accordingly.
It's been said that Cisco looked at rejigging to deal with commodity silicon but it was nixed by the accountants on the basis that it'd turn a $40 billion business into a $25 billion one. They missed out that the cost of NOT rejigging might well be to turn it into a $0 billion business.
The market is sick and tired of Cisco's "900 pound gorilla" pricing and support structures. There are a number of alternatives and their remaining business mainly comes down to the "nobody ever got fired for buying ..." crowd.
(*) Huawei, HP, Brocade, Juniper, Arista and Avaya were all close in pricing. Cisco were notably more expensive AND had lower specs than the rest. It was clear they were trading on their name and their sales guys approached the deal like they already had the sale in the bag.