IBM's proprietary nightmares have, historically, often been quite cost effective. AS/400 did eventually get too long in the tooth, but it had an amazing run for decades where it was extremely competitive for TCO.

AS/400 is alive and well. It's now called IBMi and runs on POWER hardware.

Yeah, but they aren't so dominant on the TCO side as they once were.

Historically sums it up.

I also think most cloud providers are at least a vendor lock-in and maybe a proprietary nightmare. This way you at least got your own iron and ibm comes to fix parts when they break. (Without disabling your system)

I do agree it is debatable whether it is beter than x86 most of the time cost savings projected when using a LinuxOne it is based on licensing. In the past oracle licenses where per core and we did a project where 8 ifl’s replaced 140 x86 cores

"Powerful" is irrelevant if the hw isn't up when you need it. The current sophistry is that the complexity of multiple "redundant" examples of cheap hardware always costs less than a suitable (or small number ) of better systems.

I worked at a large health insurance company a few years back. They had a DB2 server running on an IBM mainframe that they were working on replacing with a data lake and cloud-based NOSQL solutions.

It seemed rather pointless to me. The DB2 server was serving queries just fine and when we were working on setting up a microservice that would allow viewing claims history, the storage and server costs for being able to provide queries against three years’s claims were prohibitive.

But they were still persisting down that road when I left.