Dashboards and Menus

Once dashboards were in cars and menus were in restaurants. I was reminded of this today while reading an ad in “Network Computing”
magazine. ‘Dashboards‘ are a big buzzword these days in high-level management reporting and CRM systems. Deeper and deeper menus are proliferating on more and more broadcast equipment now that small LCD and plasma displays are inexpensive and ‘button per function’ devices are disappearing. And oh yes, even good ‘ole MacOS 10.4 has a dashboard !

The ad that sent me off on this tangent is from IBM Tivoli. It shows the guy from IT wearing boxing gloves, standing not in front of a bunch of blade servers, but in some kind of a TV master control area. Ever see two DigiBeta decks in a server room? (OK, it’s going to happen soon. Network-size AVID Unity installations look just like server rooms.)