An old bet...$500 to Richard T.

[learnteach]

I hereby bet Richard Threadgill that as of the 2005
Networld+Interop (or whatever equivalent general
networking event is held in the spring in Las Vegas)
all vendors of network management (management
including provisioning, monitoring, configuring,
ticket management, billing...) (network defined as
anyone who calls their equipment "network equipment")
(equipment includes hardware and software but not
stand alone services) (network management includes in
house and stand alone) will have, as their main
interface, a graphical user interface. (Main: what
they display; graphical user interface: non-command
line interface and/or anything you use a mouse to use
rather than the keyboard alone.)

So, if they all have a graphical as opposed to a command line interface, he owes me 500. If they (the vendors) have products without GUI, I owe him 500. No decision if N+I is off.

Comments

[falzalot.livejournal.com]

I think you're gonna win. :-)

[selkiediver.livejournal.com]

Ommigod! Did you have to bring back those memories???? Geez. You're lucky I'm in a foreign country...

Why wait?

[(Anonymous)]

It's already that way now, although the trend is that "graphical interface" is old news, and.... XML is the new big thing. Which is nothing more than a formatted text interface that another program can read. Hmmm.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

-- Loudog

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Heh, heh... and so my past comes back to haunt me...
On the network equipment side, it depends strongly on the vendor... Juniper and Cisco are phenomenally cli centric, checkpoint is still practically unusable from the command line. On the management side, however, its a much, much thinner field than it was five years ago. Let's see... NetCool has displaced a lot of HP Openview and is more cli-centric, but both of them are all about monitoring. Voyence is firmly in GUI-land, so are Rendition and Alterpoint. Tripwire is leading the CLI charge, although I have to give the folks at Rendition partial credit for CLI, because they got a writeup for it in the Network World competitive review two months ago. Hi, ocicat. Also, when I talked to him last, their CEO mentioned that it was one of the things that their customers was telling them was important. Anyway, I do find it interesting to note that while every single one of them ships a gui interface, all but one of the current crop ship an extremely cli centric gui - Network World also made a a fair bit of hay about each network control product's scripting capabilities.

As an aside, Tony and Will both landed at Voyence. I talked about going to Rendition for a little while, but went to Tellme instead.

So if the question is 'will they ship a product without a gui interface,' I clearly lose without further inspection. If the question is 'will they ship a product with a thin gui veneer to get you to the underlying device clis,' then I clearly win - none of the vendors is building their tools based on anything other than driving the device cli. And of course, the primary piece of non-commercial software that is in use, possibly by more users than all of the commercial platforms combined, has no gui elements at all. Although that particular effort seems to suffer from a belief that its better to name a tool so that no VP or CIO will ever approve someone spending time on it, just because of the name.