Yeah, I think the ship has sailed. People believe that cloud/clusters/whatever of Linux machines are Good Enough, and Good Enough is Good Enough. I haz a sad.
We can cheer all we like here, but the numbers tell the tale. IBM may claim huge MIPS numbers shipped--but those are listing the FULL capacity of every CEC they sell, not the actual purchased capacity, so they're exaggerated. As Paul writes below, why would someone bind themselves to a single supplier? It's Just Not Done any more (yeah, yeah, Windows...but that's software, and they can convince themselves that "We can just go to Linux if we need to", no matter how unrealistic that really is for their thousands of end-users). And with the erosion of skills available, going TO IBM Z at this point would be very, very difficult and very, very expensive. I just don't see it, try as I might. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Paul Edwards Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2025 9:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Is z/OS finally doomed? WAS: How to collect multiple datasets attributes On Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:15:41 -0500, Enzo Damato <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Enzo. You made some great observations of what the current situation is. >I've said it in SHARE talks, I've said it in person, and I've probably >said it on this mailing list, but the only way that IBM is ever going >to grow the mainframe platform, solve the skills gap, or even just stop >the slow gradual erosion of customers and installed sites is if they >create a machine cheap enough, and with license costs low enough, that >/new startups can afford it./ IBM must bring in customers who don't yet >have legacy, and that means startups and new customers. The most >effective way to sell mainframes right now would be for IBM to create a >box that costs 10K, takes up 4RU, and can run the equivalent of a few >dozen decent sized EC2 instances. This would be useless for every >existing customer base, but it would be affordable to startups, who are >don't want to get annihilated by AWS/GCP/Azure costs, and haven't yet >built out their infrastructure. I was thinking about what the barrier would be to IBM doing that (ie it is self-evident that they haven't). It's presumably because they believe it wouldn't be profitable. And then I was thinking from the customer side - why would a new customer (startup) be willing to tie themselves down to a single hardware supplier? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
