Is the Death of COBOL Finally Happening?

Could it be? The wicked witch is dead? We can stroll down the Yellow Brick Road?

Some recent announcements hint that may be happening. COBOL may, finally, be melting. First, here is what Larry has to say. Then we have IBM's z machine announcement. In both cases, the emphasis is on analytics and databases, not COBOL, which has been IBM's bread and butter for decades. IBM bought SPSS recently, I gather because they couldn't get SAS, and the z announcement stresses analytics.

Larry, on the other hand, is doing essentially the same thing: stressing hardware for databases, and java. As I wrote when the Sun deal was in the making, Larry sees the mainframe business as the last piece of fruit on the tree. There is mighty opportunity to rebuild all that stuff out of COBOL into something else; could be java, but it will be real database oriented. Don't forget that Sun and Oracle have been really interested in SSD.

Yummy.