Long story short: I think that, in the next year, we will see a marked shift toward subscription pricing. Amazon pushing subscriptions. Dollar shave club for X. Same for Cisco - getting recurring revenue through security/SDN/SaaS subscriptions rather than one-time hardware sales seems to be a safer long-term bet.
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?
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.
To guess, I think it is because Cisco will pursue a strategy of software defined networking. That means more consolidated hardware development by fewer employees.
I don't think commodity hardware will fully replace all business of places like Cisco. For one, Cisco does have large contracts like the Chinese Government -- they helped build the "great firewall".
I have no idea how this shakes out. But multiple companies in the traditional skew/license business are having to adjust (as others stated) to a different world.
