Extended EoL for Sustainability

So next week I am off to Cisco Live Emea 2024 again and one of my agenda items is to answer a question that has been bugging me for a little while.

If our vendors really cared about sustainability, then why wouldn't they extend the EoL support across their hardware platforms?

A few points to note here are...

• I haven't done extensive research on this and I am not being contrarian for the sake of it. But I have paid a lot of money to attend a large educational conference, so I really hope that someone, on what is now an increasing large sustainability stand, can help me with this.
• This question is not solely for Cisco or even the networking industry. The same question could be aimed at pretty much all hardware and was prompted when a valued friend who works in the circular economy once told me that the most sustainable car, is the one you already have.
• One potential answer is that newer hardware has a smaller carbon footprint, lower power consumption and requires less cooling. However, this feels like it will be an incremental improvement and it could take several years for new switches and routers to provide net gains over the replaced hardware, by which time they too will need to be replaced. Again I haven't done the numbers on this, so please educate me.
• Another potential answer is the bottom line. Extending EoL by two years would massively impact the vendors bottom line because we simply wouldn't need as much hardware. And for balance it could also impact our own small consultancy Starfish , as a lot of our engagement are driven by transformation.
• My final point is that Cisco and other vendors are capable of producing incredible equipment that can last for years. For example, we are still working in environments with Cisco 6500s and some have an uptime of five to 10 years. For a long time, we have been seeing hardware refresh being driven not by extra performance or new capabilities but by the need to avoid out of support and End of Life hardware.

So a call out to all you Cisco Sustainability people at Cisco Live - if I call by the stand, can you help with this question? If you can, I promise not to complain about the fact that we don't get free pens and squeezy balls anymore.