> If you read with a little less haste and hostility, and a little more humility--rather than just jumping in and getting personal, you will see that I am being perfectly clear.

You literally called me a 'fanboy' but I am somehow I am hostile. I didn't say anything hostile in the slightest.

You even doubled down on your position. If you were ever gone be google or a mainframe you would have done it already, so be happy with the garbage provided. That literally your argument.

> I am saying that this battle already played-out, 15-20 years ago.

Markets change over time. Its never set in stone. The industry is continuing to grow, computing needs increase for all companies and many, many billions get spend each year on new servers.

The main reason the 'fancy' hardware like Sun and friends failed, was because of the processor on the hardware side, and because of open source linux on the software side. The costume motherboards that cost slightly more and firmware weren't actually the real problem.

Also, 20 years ago was before virtualization and scripted setup were universal, things were just totally different. Those decisions should effect what the right decisions are today.

> The people who need primo hardware already have things like zseries

Again, the market is growing, any money companies who might have needed 10 computers in the past now need 100. And those that needed 100, no need 1000. And so on.

There is a gigantic gap between a mainframe and your standard Dell PC Server, there is lots of space between those things.

> The rest is in the commodity band, where interchangeability is key.

And yet a huge amount isn't actually this perfect interchangeable commodity. Sure you can get any basic OS to boot and there is some standards, but the situation isn't close to actually being a true commodity.

It also depends on where you expect interchangeability. If you define much of your infrastructure with terraform scripts and a few services to monitor everything, then that's the interchangeability layer you actually care about. Sure if you buy a bunch of Oxide servers, you can just rip one out and replace with the server from some other vendor. You have to rip out the whole rack and replace it with some other rack.

But whatever that something else is, its just gone be another target for your terraform scripts that gets monitored in a comparable way (against hat part isn't neatly standardized anyway). Industry 'standards' like RedFish are not close to providing that even for pretty low level stuff. And once you want to do more complex things there are even less standards.

If you operate a number of VxRail Dell Rack, its not that easy to just rip it out and replace it with some rack of HP machines. Again, this is specially true if you use anything but the most basic features, because very quickly you are in proprietary non-standard software hell. Guess what, Dell doesn't actually want their racks to be perfectly easily replaceable.

And if you have an issue that your Dell rack and your HP rack behave inconsistently, guess who isn't gone care about that, Dell and HP. And guess what, neither of their implementation is open source either so good luck with that. There is a reason people stick to a low number of vendors.