I am old enough to have had the pleasure of Atiq Raza telling me the thing I was helping pitch couldn't be sold to Avaya (or was it Cisco?) in four months for $1 billion and so is not interesting, within the first four minutes of the meeting. Evidently he was seeing enough pitches for things he could sell at that price and in that time.

Now he's in AI investments.

Really good analogy: Bay Networks, Lucent, Nortel, and Cisco got beat up or destroyed on the equipment side. And then the long haul fiber companies never got ROI (but paved the way for broadband).

almost nobody remember the router craze.

people don't even remember the era before the current brands. like the time a bell offshoot almost crashed canada because they siphoned all the telephone money into bad routers.

Cisco?