The most exciting thing about today is that it uniquely provides mainframe reliability with the ability to quickly create and deploy server applications. The desktop is gone, but VM is a best-of-breed server environment.
VM is the only environment that allows exploitation of economy of scale and use of existing mainframe support infrastructure, combined with personalized computing.
90% of a system's resources tend to be used by 10% of the users. This has two effects: first, that the resources needed to support most users are insignificant, and hence their true per-user costs are low. Secondly, the 10% of users consuming the bulk of the resources tends to be different from moment to moment. Only large shared systems (i.e., mainframes) allow a computing resource to be shared. With competing technologies, dedicated systems must be built for each user's peak resource requirements, even if they only use it infrequently.
Of course, Personal/390 introduces an effective desktop VM, an exciting way of extending the VM computing environment to the workstation arena. I hope that IBM understands what a breakthrough this is, and that this is one of the few competitive advantages that they can exclusively call their own. Only IBM has the ability to provide a single, compatible computing environment from the desktop to the raised floor data center, and they can only do it with VM. If they can only learn to grab this opportunity, it can be key to both VM and IBM.
For all these reasons, VM/CMS remains the most cost effective and flexible way to handle a variety of computing tasks. Both IBM and the user community should continue to market and encourage the use of its unique capabilities.
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