I'm kind of curious why, if they were profitable as this seems to imply, they wouldn't just spin it off as a subsidiary. If it wasn't profitable, perhaps they tried to sell it and failed.
One of the theories for shutting this down that I've heard is that having consumer electronics companies lumped in with the rest of the company lowers the margins, which is a bad thing in the eyes of Wall Street analysts. Cisco stock price took a huge beating (20%) this past quarter when their margins dropped by a couple percentage points, and I believe they're scrambling to get those numbers back up. Seems they're "reorganizing" Linksys as well, probably to get margins up there as well.
One of the theories for shutting this down that I've heard is that having consumer electronics companies lumped in with the rest of the company lowers the margins, which is a bad thing in the eyes of Wall Street analysts. Cisco stock price took a huge beating (20%) this past quarter when their margins dropped by a couple percentage points, and I believe they're scrambling to get those numbers back up. Seems they're "reorganizing" Linksys as well, probably to get margins up there as well.