More importantly, for a lot of the things that people build today, a mainframe is powerful enough to handle however large the load will get. The ultra-scalable

More importantly, for a lot of the things that people build today, a mainframe is powerful enough to handle however large the load will get. The ultra-scalable techniques that Google, Facebook, ect, use are great, but most applications do not need that kind of scalability. Throwing a little more money on a fancy mainframe is much, much cheaper than the programmer time needed to build a distributed system.