The End of the GUI?

Back in the 80′s, Microsoft made their fortune by creating products that used a graphical user interface. Today though, there seems to be a reversal of that thought process. Windows Server 2008 offers a mode called Server Core that doesn’t even have a GUI, and more and more of the utilities that are provided on TechNet seem to be command line only. A friend in Redmond told me that Microsoft really expects all Windows administrators to know how to work with PowerShell, a command line environment that has started to show up in a lot of Microsoft server products.

So what does all this mean? I really don’t know. It’s just an observation. I don’t think that the GUI is going to completely go away any time soon, but it does strike me as odd just how much of a comeback the command line is making.