[geenew]

I would be sad to see it go, if only for the fact that they are (afaik) the only ones keeping mainframes alive as a modern thing.

Idle speculation, but I wonder if that could save IBM, if and when the market starts to sour on cloud computing (for cost and/or control reasons). Mainframes have a lot of overlap in terms of functionality (VMs, reliability, similar purchasing model for computing power) with cloud services.