[rtempaccount1]

There is a middle ground between those two extremes of course.

I'm not surprised at the mainframe's lack of success at all, the barriers to entry are extreme, meaning there's an inevitable lack of activity.

I've worked in environments which had mainframes deployed and even as an employee it was inordinately difficult to get any access to them.

Combine that with IBM's "enterprise" sales process and it's not a mystery that they lost the fight to attract newer systems...