This is a classic case of a business losing a market because they didn't want to let go of a dying but profitable business. The market always wins in the long run.
Don't feel sad. This market dynamic is how startups can get ahead. Otherwise everything would be dominated by the huge incumbents forever.
> Otherwise everything would be dominated by the huge incumbents forever.
One thing to remember is that mainframes are still dominated by IBM, 60 years later. And mainframes are still a somewhat stable market worth billions of dollars.
IT works primarily by accretion, new markets are created, and in those markets IT also seems to work by natural monopolies due to network effects, so once the market stabilizes the huge incumbents are there forever.
IBM still dominates mainframes, minicomputers are gone so no one dominates those anymore, workstations are also gone so no domination there either, but PCs are dominated by Microsoft and have been for 40 years, smartphones are split between Android and iOS and both will probably be around as long as we use smartphones.
?? PC (Desktop) OS are certainly dominated by Microsoft, but I don't see any one player dominating the PC Market. There's definitely companies that dominate different PC components (OS, CPU, audio, network, etc)
Anyway, I know that the mainframe market is pretty healthy, but who are the clients?
> Anyway, I know that the mainframe market is pretty healthy, but who are the clients?
Banks, insurance companies and airlines. The amount of only-documented-in-code corner cases and custom business logic is immense (for the really old, up to 60 years!) which means rewrites are immensely difficult and expensive (and prone to failure), the amount of government regulation and the fines for when things go south (aka people lose money) is equally massive, and the companies are ruled by beancounters by definition which means they will, as long as IBM has mainframes and support for them, go with keeping their mainframe stuff to "never touch a running system".
That is part of why fintech start-ups are eating the old banks and insurance companies alive... they can design proper systems from scratch without having to take care of decades of accumulated cruft that needs to be migrated and especially they don't have to retain horribly outdated and complex business logic, workflows and processes that would take old-school companies billions of dollars to re-train their staff - almost 2 million people in 2019, per https://www.statista.com/statistics/250220/ranking-of-united....
It's not obviously a mistake to me. They may well have been better off just milking that existing business for all its worth rather than accelerating its demise by moving into barely profitable markets. As far as I know they are still in the mainframe business.
Don't feel sad. This market dynamic is how startups can get ahead. Otherwise everything would be dominated by the huge incumbents forever.