The z mainframe team does good technical work but then the high price cancels out all the value of that work. I'm not sure if that counts as innovation or not.

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tempest_ 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they?

So they are just selling to the existing pool of users for which the price just has to come in under the cost/risk of rewriting all their ancient stuff.

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theandrewbailey 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Someone has to be buying mainframes. Otherwise, there's no point in continuing to develop them. Shareholders would revolt.

	▲	wmf 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The existing 1,000 customers replace their old mainframes with newer models.

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SoftTalker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are mostly leased, I think.

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bitwize 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A single mainframe can handle workloads that would take dozens of x86 cloud servers, with nine nines of uptime. If you can afford it it pays for itself in terms of reliability and scalability.

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wmf 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That may be true but the dozens of x86 servers are cheaper and easier to use.

	▲	bob1029 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sometimes quality of service matters more than cost. If the consumer segment started to develop a sense that their payment cards were glitchy or unreliable, our economy could suffer real consequences. Error free, secure, instant payment experiences are essential. Go visit a local grocery store and measure how long it takes to authorize a transaction each time a card is presented to the terminal. Pay special attention to how fast the Visa and American Express networks are. At my local Kroger the terminal and network setup is so fast that you can use the chip reader almost like a mag stripe reader. https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...