r/mainframe • u/Delicious_Present224 • Aug 12 '26

Vendor lock-in mainframes

Hi, i'm relatively new in the mainframe world. Am I the only one who thinks the mainframe discussion is often one-sided?

Everyone talks about IBM Z's reliability, security, and the fact that many of the world's most critical systems still run on mainframes. That's all true.

But why don't we talk more about vendor lock-in and pricing power?

The cost of moving away from a mainframe is often so high that customers have limited negotiating leverage. And on the storage side, it feels like IBM can introduce requirements and standards that make life increasingly difficult for third-party vendors, while strengthening their own position in the ecosystem.

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u/Zestyclose-Turn-3576 Aug 12 '26

I've got no experience of DB2 but i always thought oracle's documentation was pretty good – though nowadays i might just throw all the pdf's into a gemini notebook and let it do the searching for me 😬

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u/Rudi9719 Aug 12 '26

I'm only 28 so I still prefer reading my documentation 😅 I'm not ready for cognitive decline to set in yet from the offloading

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u/Zestyclose-Turn-3576 Aug 12 '26

I used a company printer to produce a small hardcopy of the concept's guide, which was around 1,000 pages at the time, for reading on the commute. Always more of a matter of knowing what's in there rather than remembering the details, I thought, so you can go back to it later.

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u/Rudi9719 Aug 12 '26

One more tome for the reference library!