If you could say to your business leaders: let’s talk about where data is today, where it needs to be tomorrow, and how we can build a network where we can consciously balance between network complexity, network cost, and application performance, would that change the game at all? What if you could say: let’s talk about building a network that provides minimal jitter and fixed delay for defined workloads, and yet allows data to be quickly tied to public clouds in a way that allows application developers to choose what is best for any particular use case?

Finally, once we stop believing in software-defined fairy tales, and realize application problems have to be solved in application layer and not pushed down to networking ...

On the other hand, people pulling cables in buildings are still making good money ;))