Thread regarding IBM layoffs

It is a matter of time, when not if that clients will not invest further in MF and will move away from it eventually.
I suspect that the whole Systems group will be sold, time has come to make the rumor true

Look at the Zowe project. They are bringing modern dev tools to Z. Probably in a last-ditch attempt to save the mainframe. They seem to think kids are going to learn COBOL and PL/1 to take the place of aging old-timers who are either retiring or dying. Unless they're gonna teach it in schools again, I doubt it's going to work. Kids these days just hack sh-- together from pieces that others write and think they're geniuses. Writing code from scratch isn't anything they're interested in. Writing in a 60 year old language isn't anything they are interested in, because there aren't any samples they can swipe from GitHub or StackOverflow. Gonna be a massive failure that goes nowhere.

Zlinux is a desperate attempt to remain relevant, but the number of new z logos is essentially zero. It's just not remotely cost competitive with clusters of commodity hardware, and cloud technology eliminates the mythical 'zero downtime' advantage. Every mainframe customer I dealt with would gladly chuck the platform, and it's extortionist licensing costs if they could affordably replace the code. With the death of old fart cobol programmers, and a total lack on interest by new grads in tying their own livelihood to a dead end technology, coupled with increasingly insurmountable gaps in functionality, mainframe is in its way out. It'll take decades more, to be sure, but the platform is dying. Milk those fake ela deals to reduce mlc cost by shifting to midrange shelf ware while you can.

We have many independent pendulums. Deployment environments are swinging from networked computers to pervasive clouds. Servers are swinging from physical boxes to massively interconnected VM's. In little more than 10 years, we went from PCs on a desktop to the equivalent of 1980 mainframes in our pocket. Meanwhile, the privacy pendulum reversed after years of trending toward social openness back to personal privacy (thanks Facebook). Mainframes need to abandon their COBOL and PL/1 roots to go where the pendulums are headed: Secure and scalable, pervasive computing that doesn't care about hardware. I seriously doubt any Z-series executive can articulate a viable strategy that isn't rooted in 1950s thinking and fear of further cannibalizing an already imploding market.

1ooh. You are completely correct. It’s all about the code. It’s far more efficient to buy HW that supports the existing code vs rewriting.

the problem is the original programmers are long gone and nobody understands the old source code, if it even exists. so they have to keep buying compatible to run the old binaries.

sorry disagree with that comment - the trouble with code nowdays its lazy code not very efficient. mainframes are very efficient in the way they work. if you want "modern" code the mainframe supports Z linux, has done for years.

the obstacle has always been extracting business logic from ancient code and porting to something modern. It's not about compute, it's about code. Once you have modern code, the mainframe is completely irrelevant,