Cisco released new firmware for ACI on 22 Oct 2020. I was in the middle of having a problem with upgrading a lab from 4.2 to 5.0 when I read that one of the enhancements in 5.1 was:

Enhancements to the upgrade process through the GUI when upgrading the APIC or switch software

so I thought I’d give 5.1 a shot.

Now the first worrying sign that I noticed with the UI for the upgrade process is that it looks much more like the super-unfriendly GUI of the ACI MSO (Multi Site Orchestrator)

but having said that, it turned out to be less confusing than MSO in this instance, and the upgrade process worked. But I really do have to wonder at the colloquial language used in the GUI – is this some kind of attempt to appeal to the masses by Cisco? If so, they are only making it harder for all those customers that don’t come from an English speaking background (or should I say North American speaking background) to understand the application. The dialogue that particularly annoyed me was this one:

Now not too many users will be jumping to get their watch out (many users don’t even use a watch), and the exclamation Watch Out is pretty universal, but why change from the traditional Caution text that is usually associated with a dialogue of this type?

So I can accept the Watch Out colloquialism, but Continue Anyways is NOT acceptable. This is an absolute affirmation that Cisco only cares about North American users and not the rest of the world. It is even worse than referring to events occurring in the summer or some other season with absolute arrogance – as if the southern hemisphere didn’t exist. Although that instance is probably ignorance of the fact that there IS a southern hemisphere.

And I suspect that in this case it is another case of ignorance and the usual lack of quality control in the ACI user interface. (Don’t let me start on the number of inconsistent namings used in the ACI GUI…)

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