1999-10-18-01:31:39 Eyal Traitel:
CLI will be out in the next few years, no matters where your nostalgia goes.
If by "CLI" you mean command-line interfaces, why no, they're going nowhere, they remain the most efficient and powerful tool for getting work done.
Sure, somewhere well over 90% of users may prefer to avoid getting work done, and for that goal, graphical user interfaces are terrific, but there will remain a few of us who use our computers productively, and we'll be using command lines.
None of which has anything to do with the issue at hand....
The whole market is going that way, and I'm not sure it's that bad, but anyway - NetApp is probably not the first company to have a nice looking web.
Blame your textual browsers for not handling that, no NetApp for designing good looking pages.
Ahh, you've confused "nice-looking website" with "website that requires Java, Javascript, or cookies to navigate". Turns out they have nothing to do with each other; rather, "websites that require security-problematic hacks to use" are better correlated with "websites designed by morons". Browsers that don't support Java, Javascript, or cookies --- or that have these capabilities turned off --- are the choice of people who care about security, performance, and stability.
Now there may well be a coincidence that people who care about these things may be likelier to care about getting work done, and less interested in playing games, and so may be likelier to use a command-line more than a GUI, so perhaps I'm wrong, maybe your opening salvo really was apropos. Of course if Netapp things the vast majority of people who don't want to get work done constitute the market they need to pursue to increase their market share, then maybe their website redesign is appropriate. But if they're pursuing that pack, they probably need to drop the price per box by a couple of orders of magnitude.
-Bennett