> If as you say mainframes are overpriced and inefficient, that means there is a great opportunity for some organization to move with a much cheaper, more efficient option.

But isn't that what Facebook, Google, and Amazon are doing? Using massively distributed commodity x86 hardware to eat away at incumbent businesses that would outsource their IT services to mainframes? Last I read, Google is about to go into auto insurance, and all three companies I listed do payment processing.

If software is eating the world, SV behemoths are eating business verticals.