Just over a decade ago, Toshiba Corp threw in the towel on mainframes and handed its business over to NEC Corp, and just the other day, Toshiba pulled out of the audio business, and with the ravaged state of the Japanese economic environment, with electronics companies among those hurting the most, it is time again to think the unthinkable and ask when does Hitachi Ltd pull out of mainframes? Now that the IBM Corp mainframe market is clearly beginning to shrink – and the trend can only accelerate, the business threatens to shrink even faster for plug-compatible vendors than for IBM itself, and with all the big Japanese companies looking very hard at their investment plans, it is hard to see Hitachi wanting to dedicate the investment needed to design a next generation – after all, it is a vast conglomerate with big heavy engineering interests and fingers in all the electronic pies, unlike Fujitsu Ltd, which lives or dies by computers, all of which suggests that by around mid-decade, Hitachi will be looking for someone to hand its mainframe business on to (no doubt it will continue to make peripherals); the intriguing question is – does it hand it over to erstwhile partner Fujitsu, or does it do a Mitsubishi Electric Corp and buy processors OEM from IBM Japan Ltd?
