Just don't give them ideas about Cisco's current solution of moving to subscription based licensing network switches

That's basically GeForce Now, in this context...

So, I'm afraid that they already got (and applied) the idea :p

They also learned from the previous crypto crash where they were stuck with a huge stash of 1060s.

Learned what? How to create a bunch of junk that will be unusable in a few years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

can somebody explain?

Cisco and Sun were the go-to big name equipment suppliers to many startups around the dot-com days. A lot of it was stupid expensive (like 150k for a sun server with the performance of a 5k Linux box, or 20k for a basic Cisco router). Well, when the startups folded a huge amount of that equipment got sold for pennies on the dollar and Cisco basically almost went bankrupt - and Sun basically did.

the glory days of just bonkers sun servers! as a young pup consultant fresh in the USA, i was lucky enough to help setup a fully loaded sun enterprise e10000, gigantic (for the time) external disk arrays and a room-sized storagetek powderhorn[0]. it was in dallas for an insurance company ~1997. all in-house apps, crunching credit card risk stuff i think? an interesting quirk is that they were an almost all-X11 shop! they had a really sweet custom CDE setup. not what you'd expect at that type of firm. would love to know what that e10k eventually sold for.

[0] https://iscgroupllc.com/en/supported-equipment/tape-librarie...