Mainframes are the new Cloud

It just had to happen - Economist:

The mainframe may well find a new home in corporate computing clouds, the pools of data-processing capacity many firms are building. Many companies are also increasingly interested in buying simpler, more integrated computer systems, even if this means a higher price. Reacting to this, IBM’s rivals are making bets on mainframe-like products. On January 13th HP and Microsoft announced a pact to come up with tight packages of hardware and software. Brad Day of Forrester Research, another market-research group, puts it thus: “We are on the way back to the future.”

Of course, the end of the mainframe was spelled by users taking control of their data and applications on their own smart local devices, free from the interference of central wizards and unreliable, unresponsive central systems.

Perish the thought that history would repeat itself - after all, as the Google/China incident has most recently shown, nothing can go wrong in the Cloud...click...go wrong in the Cloud..click...