"Get the PHBs to ignore people who actually knew what was good or bad in IT."

Yet they (and possibly a few like vendors) get hailed like great innovators and causes of world-wide computer-y goodness.

And, yeah, even Trevor wrote an article in which he got all giddy when he discovered windows 8 will have a supposedly usable command line, honestly this time, when he's a complete fanboi-in-denial, running everything with hundreds of GUIs open all the time, including webmin for his linux boxes. His denials that he really isn't a fanboi, honest, sound remarkably like so much marketeering from his governing company to me. But I digress.

The command line has never been away. It got pushed out of offices, but to run a serious infrastructure you can't have your shop consist of thousands of GUIs. You automate. (Clueful shops do that. Not-so-clueful shops fail to scale. If you have chronic IT problems that you can't quite pin down, this is a good angle to investigate.) And as it happens, a CLI is just about the most easily automated interface* we've come up with so far. Humans can use it, scripts can drive it. That's all you need, really.

As to linux, well, their particular fanboi tendencies haven't been productive. Lots of enthousiasm, not enough skill in talking to the PHBs, and often a bit too focused on attacking their nemesis instead of providing real solutions for real problems. That the commercial competition didn't quite deliver is neither here nor there; to be a better replacement you have to deliver on the promise better than the replacee. Yet all the same, linux is quite big, there's lots and lots of software available, and given the right support, reasonably (if not quite perfectly) usable. We'll see more of it, count on it. Might take a generation or two, though.

* I've seen things that were billed "CLI" but were not in any way or form automatable. Then, as would be the obvious conclusion, they weren't command line interfaces. And indeed they weren't. The term for that sort of thing is "TUI".