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That's a logical pivot; I'm slightly surprised they didn't try beefing up their extended support or doing a soft rollout first. Did they lay any groundwork or expectations for migrating their platform?

Yup. For a few years at least until business see the TCO and realize that these services aren't cost-effective at scale.

It's like this already -- you pay yearly maintenance fees for access to software upgrades. If you let it lapse and then want to re-enroll, you're still on the hook for the lapsed time. Maintenance fees typically don't include your support contract fees, either.

It's already happening. Several examples come to mind, but for now I'll use one that is relevant to Cisco: Palo Alto Networks offers several subscription based services for its security/networking hardware.

IPS and URL filtering have always been a subscription model though.