In 2000, all the Cisco wireless stuff was based on Aironet, which they acquired. At that time, Cisco was still making their own chip sets and they had a pretty classy product. There was some degradation in converting the access points to IOS but it was still pretty good. There was an A radio they added that was made by an operation they acquired in Australia, which never really worked out well, but it worked. When the G radios came out, they outsourced the chip set to Atheros (never did get the source code for the drivers), and things started going down hill. They also started making more of their chips in China. Cisco started regarding the wireless stuff as a commodity and there was a lot of talk about disbanding the client group entirely. Most of the code was moved to Bangalore for testing and maintenance. Later still they phased out the autonomous access points for centrally controlled AP's which were produced by an acquisition on the east coast. The client group was back in favor again but it was split between the Ohio group, east coast group, and Bangalore. A few years ago the east coast operation was reduced by over half and the Ohio group by a third. Last November, 2 more of the Ohio client group were "early retired". That leaves 5.
It's safe to say that Cisco has changed for the worse. I'm sorry to see it go.