I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more

I was researching a follow up to how will cloud computing change network management post and I came across something rather odd I’d like to share with you.

Below are a series of graphs culled from Google Trends showing the relative search levels of various network management related keywords.

What is the most significant feature of them? What struck me is the downward decline with various degrees of steepness. The searches don’t just represent commercial network management tools, there are open source projects and open core products there too. I even put searches for network management protocols like SNMP and NetFlow in too. They all show declines.

The only search not showing a decline is Icinga. But, that may just be because it is a relatively recent project so it doesn’t have a history of higher volumes of searches it probably would have had if it were a bit older.