I fully agree and have said so for a long time. Big companies grow from small companies. Small companies use small systems. Small systems grow gradually into bigger systems.
But why would someone running a small system put all the effort in to switch from a Linux/Windows platform to z/OS. IBM need to find those small companies. Then show how growth can be achieved with a scalable system z infrastructure. But get the pricing right. Lennie -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Enzo Damato Sent: 30 October 2025 23:16 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Is z/OS finally doomed? WAS: How to collect multiple datasets attributes I've seen a number of people speculating in this thread about why z/OS's market share hasn't increased, covering everything from technical features, sales, hyperscalers, etc. I think that these are all good points, but they are missing the real underlying factor as to why adoption hasn't increased. This (https://web.archive.org/web/20070605070840/https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/full/1995/) is a list of the fortune 500 in 1995. Almost all of these companies were mainframe users then, and still are today. What changed is that new companies stopped adopting mainframes. 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. This meant, that as google grew, it grew around the clustered Linux platform that it started with. That became it's legacy. In the same way that mainframe -> Linux migrations are almost impossible for a major bank, a Linux - mainframe migration would be just as impossible for Google. There's too much tech debt, and too many processes that have adapted to the old system. The technical details are almost irrelevant. Tomorrow, an angel could visit IBM headquarters and deliver a set of golden CPU dies and OS source tapes, to create a mainframe system with performance 100 times anything else currently on the market and it still wouldn't matter, because IBM would price it at a start price of a million dollars, and the only customers would be those doing lateral upgrades. 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. Until we have that, discussions of feature matrices, reliability, instruction speeds, or the sales force is like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Just my two cents on the topic, Enzo Damato > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send > email [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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
