Gartner's Schay tells of a major auto-leasing company that switched to PCs, only to find that it couldn't keep up with the crush of reservations. Just plug in and play. It won't be for a very long time. Such disillusionment has the folks at IBM practically crowing ing. The mainframe won't go away, says William Reedy, a marketing director for Big Blue's heavy metal.
Volume is up sharply.
None of this means that networks of PCs are a dead end. To the contrary everyone agrees that's the way the industry will gradually go. But a new sense of realism is clearly taking hold. For the next decade, at least, the computing world will be a hybrid. The humming-thrumming Big Thing in the back room may be a dinosaur, but it's nowhere near extinct.