> Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes
Unfortunately IBM mainframes are still around. No new customers, but existing ones are too afraid of touching it because it's usually the result of decades of spaghetti hence they're locked in for the forseeble future. So they'll keep renewing contracts and refreshing hardware periodically. IBM prints money with this stuff, and use some of it for all their acquisitions of various software companies (biggest one was Red Hat) to leverage their massive B2B sales org to sell oher stuff to those existing customer relationships.
To their credit, IBM is still making zArchitecture chips that aren’t completely humiliated by x86 and ARM. Note also since 2000 IBM helped improve the Linux kernel and got it working in zArchitecture so if a business that has old COBOL or CICS applications wants to run some Linux apps in virtualization on the same machine they can.
Unfortunately IBM mainframes are still around. No new customers, but existing ones are too afraid of touching it because it's usually the result of decades of spaghetti hence they're locked in for the forseeble future. So they'll keep renewing contracts and refreshing hardware periodically. IBM prints money with this stuff, and use some of it for all their acquisitions of various software companies (biggest one was Red Hat) to leverage their massive B2B sales org to sell oher stuff to those existing customer relationships.