Althought there is a time and place for mainframe mentality from IBM, the need for such technology diminishes with time and progress from vendors like Microsoft who prefer the “mom and pop” business and home user approach.
Mainframe mentality may be acceptable in a large corporate environment where thousands of transactions occur instantly and a large staff of IT people support the “beast’s” operations, but in real life it is costly overkill that can be much better served by putting a full load of user software on the user’s desktop system and sharing other resources (databases, print spoolers,Internet access/security, etc.) on the servers.
If the “mainframe” (server, etc.) crashes every user on that system is affected. This process is a great inconvenince to users and cost companies millions of dollars in productivity every day the mainframe hickups.
If a desktop has the appropriate software, the user can continue working while the server is down …. and if a desktop is down, it only affects the user of that desktop. A desktop or server can usually be revived within minutes while mainframes can take hours.
Properly designed Server/Desktop sites have much lower cost and better “uptime” ratios than any Mainframe site.
I doubt that IBM/Lotus will have successes with on this old mainframe mentality based idea … but, as usual they keep trying old methods instead of trying to conform with the new technology that is available to us in the new millenium.
