Re : it’s a very odd move...
"tells world+dog that it thinks all workloads are headed for the cloud."
But the cloud is on-prem. If you are a customer of a cloud provider, then it's just that on-prem is somewhere else. Where is it exactly the author thinks AWS host all of these services they provide? It's certainly not up in the sky on an actual little fluffy cloud. It's across quite a few globally distributed datacentres all of which still ultimately rely on physical infrastructure and networks to operate; ummm... including switches.
When you consider the scale that Amazon continue to ramp up at then it does actually make sense if they can make, operate and maintain them cheaper than they can purchase and maintain them through Cisco. If they can then start selling those to other cloud providers - then they are double quids in right?