A former Cisco engineer turned SDN pioneer, writing in The Register, argues that simply bolting an API onto networking hardware fails to solve the underlying difficulty of managing large networks, because the real obstacle is inconsistency between devices rather than a lack of programmatic access. The piece stems from feedback on a draft of the seventh edition of the textbook "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach," which prompted the authors to acknowledge that their view of network operations had been shaped mainly by cloud-operator practices rather than those of traditional network operators.

The author draws on personal experience, including a 2011 move from Cisco to SDN startup Nicira, to illustrate how feature sets vary wildly not just between vendors but across a single vendor's own product lines. As evidence, they point to the NAPALM automation project, which supports five vendor operating systems (three from Cisco alone), yet even devices sharing the same OS can implement identical features differently. Efforts at Cisco to standardise features such as QoS and MPLS achieved only moderate success, hampered by product teams' incentives to differentiate their offerings — an example of Conway's Law, whereby a company's products mirror its internal organisational structure.