In 1991, Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld and a thoughtful observer of industry trends, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996.
Last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, the aged yet remarkably resilient warhorse of computing.
Today, mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market. But with the mainframe facing extinction, IBM retooled the technology, cut prices and revamped its strategy.
A result is that mainframe technology -- hardware, software and services -- remains a large and lucrative business for IBM, and mainframes are still the back-office engines behind the world's financial markets and much of global commerce.
The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways.
A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.
What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: There must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers.
The unfulfilled predictions of demise, experts say, tend to overestimate the importance of pure technical innovation and underestimate the role of business judgment.
"The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism," said Richard Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School.
To survive, technologies must evolve, much as animal species do in nature. Indeed, John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author, observes that there are striking similarities in the evolutionary process of markets and biological ecosystems. Dinosaurs, he notes, may be long gone, victims of a change in climate that better suited mammals. But smaller reptiles evolved and survived, and today there are more than 8,000 species of reptiles, mainly lizards and snakes, compared with about 5,400 species of mammals.
As a media technology, radio is an evolutionary survivor. Its time as the entertainment hub of American households in the 1930s and 1940s, captured in the Woody Allen film Radio Days, gave way to the rise of TV.
TV replaced radio as the box families gathered around in their living rooms. Instead, radio adopted shorter programming formats and became the background music and chat while people ride in cars or do other things at home -- "audio wallpaper," as Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, puts it.
While television did pose a threat to movies, it also served as a prod to innovation, including failures like Smell-O-Vision but also wide-screen, rich-color technologies like Cinerama and CinemaScope. The idea -- and a good one -- was to give viewers a more vivid, immersive experience than they could possibly have with television.
Today, movies, like other traditional media, face the digital challenge of the Internet. And Saffo is betting that after a period of adjustment and experimentation, they will make another life-prolonging adaptation.
"Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on," he said.
The survivors also build on their own technical foundations as well as the human legacy of people skilled in the use of a technology and the business culture and habits that surround it.
And a change in the economic environment can sometimes lead to the renaissance of an older technology. Railroads, for example, have enjoyed a revival of investment recently as rising fuel costs and road congestion have prompted shippers to move from trucks to trains; some travelers, too, have opted for railways, along routes like the Boston-New York-Washington corridor.
The weight of legacy is underestimated, according to John Staudenmaier, editor of the journal Technology and Culture, because innovation is so often portrayed as a bold break with the past. A few stories of technological achievement fit that mold, like the Manhattan Project, but they are rare indeed.
The mainframe is the classic survivor technology, and it owes its longevity to sound business decisions. IBM overhauled the insides of the mainframe, using low-cost microprocessors as the computing engine. The company invested and updated the mainframe software, so that banks, corporations and government agencies could still rely on the mainframe as the rock-solid reliable and secure computer for vital transactions and data, while allowing it to take on new chores like running Web-based programs.
"The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to thrive because customers didn't care about the underlying technology," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who led the technical transformation of the mainframe in the early 1990s and is a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Customers just wanted the mainframe to do its job at a lower cost, and IBM made the investments to make that happen," he said.
IBM's most recent model, the z10, represents an investment of US$1.5 billion and the work of 5,000 technical professionals. To nurture its ecosystem, the company partners with 400 universities worldwide in programs to teach mainframe skills.
The mainframe doomsayer, Alsop, is now a venture capitalist. In retrospect, he says, his 1991 prediction was wrong only in the timing. IBM has so drastically reinvented the mainframe technology and its business model that the mainframes he wrote about are long gone.
"It is a different world," Alsop said.
Former US president Jimmy Carter’s legacy regarding Taiwan is a complex tapestry woven with decisions that, while controversial, were instrumental in shaping the nation’s path and its enduring relationship with the US. As the world reflects on Carter’s life and his recent passing at the age of 100, his presidency marked a transformative era in Taiwan-US-China relations, particularly through the landmark decision in 1978 to formally recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the sole legal government of China, effectively derecognizing the Republic of China (ROC) based in Taiwan. That decision continues to influence geopolitical dynamics and Taiwan’s unique
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said that he expects this year to be a year of “peace.” However, this is ironic given the actions of some KMT legislators and politicians. To push forward several amendments, they went against the principles of legislation such as substantive deliberation, and even tried to remove obstacles with violence during the third readings of the bills. Chu says that the KMT represents the public interest, accusing President William Lai (賴清德) and the Democratic Progressive Party of fighting against the opposition. After pushing through the amendments, the KMT caucus demanded that Legislative Speaker
On New Year’s Day, it is customary to reflect on what the coming year might bring and how the past has brought about the current juncture. Just as Taiwan is preparing itself for what US president-elect Donald Trump’s second term would mean for its economy, national security and the cross-strait “status quo” this year, the passing of former US president Jimmy Carter on Monday at the age of 100 brought back painful memories of his 1978 decision to stop recognizing the Republic of China as the seat of China in favor of the People’s Republic of China. It is an
Beijing’s approval of a controversial mega-dam in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River — which flows from Tibet — has ignited widespread debate over its strategic and environmental implications. The project exacerbates the complexities of India-China relations, and underscores Beijing’s push for hydropower dominance and potential weaponization of water against India. India and China are caught in a protracted territorial dispute along the Line of Actual Control. The approval of a dam on a transboundary river adds another layer to an already strained bilateral relationship, making dialogue and trust-building even more challenging, especially given that the two Asian
RSS