One final thought from me. Major companies that went to the cloud have many other companies that get hit when an issue impacts them from a Cloud provider; plausible deniability or shared blame or whatever terms you like. For mission critical workloads there is a move back to private datacenters. That said, z/OS has to support seamlessly new runtimes at a reasonable cost or what is there is what is there.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 10:10 AM Gary Eheman <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:15:41 -0500, Enzo Damato < > [email protected]> wrote: > > (snip) > >While previously, any company of decent size that wanted reliability and > >performance over a certain threshold would have to hit up their local > >IBM sales representative, this changed with the PC revolution around > >1995ish, when Linux or Windows NT combined with high speed networking > >made it possible to achieve decent reliability and > >decent performance for a fraction of the cost. Critically, they also > >allowed you to start small! This > >( > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg > ) > >was google's first server rack! The discussion about weather or not > >google would run better on a mainframe is pointless. Google's first > >servers were a bunch of home brew computers attached to a surplus rack. > >In no universe would they ever have been able to afford a mainframe, and > >the IBM sales rep would have likely laughed them out of the room. > > > (snip) > >Enzo Damato > > > > When I saw the 1995 time frame mentioned, I decided to offer up some > relevant history that occurred before Enzo's birth. I moved over to IBM's > PC Server division from the mainframe technical marketing support side in > 1994 to work as part of a team on bringing a hybrid server solution that > included the P/390 emulator card (still in development) to market so that > more PC Server hardware could be sold (since that was the primary goal of > the PC Server division). A simplified summary of how things went down... > > "Stay in your lane PC Servers! We own the mainframe market," said S/390 > hardware division. > "Show us your less than 10 MIP strategy," said my PC Server bosses to them. > "We don't have one. " > "Ok. Then kindly step out of the way so we can sell more PC Servers." > "But we control all the mainframe software you need," said the software > division. > "Would you like to protect software revenue from software that you already > own?" > "Yes," said the software division. > "Then how about we work together on a solution?" > > And the result in 1995 was the PC Server 500 S/390 and the introduction of > Entry Support Level (ESL) pricing for most S/390 software. It was a good > thing to help slow some low-end erosion, but did nothing to help growth. > > IBM was already allowing the AS/400 division to eat the small mainframe > customer market, and it did far more damage to the low-end mainframe market > than PC Servers ever did to it in my opinion. > -- > Gary Eheman > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
