People are searching for the term progressively less over the years:
www.google.com/trends/
IBM is close to underperforming the S&P 500 for the first time in a decade:
www.google.com/finance
However, there are early signs that the continued rise of the mobile economy may help save mainframes. After largely flat movement from 2006 to 2012, there was a sharp uptick in patents that (in the abstract) discussed “mainframe” and “computer”. “Server” and “Mobile” also jumped:
Looking at patents for “mobile”, we see a similar uptick in patents for “mobile device”:
In fact, there is a strong correlation between the movement of patent counts around “Mainframe” and “Mobile Device”, suggesting that mainframes may be finding a place in the mobile economy:
Note: The data on granted patents is necessarily lagged by a few years, unfortunately. Here’s the explanation, in the form of the USPTO’s measurements of “Pendancy”, or time in “pending” status, which has consistently been more than a year.
The rise of mobile may have plateaued, but there are entirely new, data-intensive applications out there (IoT, VR) that may leverage the power of mainframes even more strongly
Mobile:
www.google.com/trends
VR, IoT and Big Data:
www.google.com/trends
And we can even see what our politicians think about these things. For example, here’s the usage of Big Data over time, as mentioned by some of the folks in Washington:
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