Many a recent discovery in science have been thanks to someone glancing over the mental partitions between fields of study and going "hey, i recognize that. We have a decade old solution for it".
The problem is that IBM shot themselves in the foot on this (just as Cisco seems to be hell bent on doing). As near as I can tell it goes like this:
(1) Companies want hardware they can find people with experience on
(2) The only way to get IBM big iron experience is to have big iron hardware (ongoing scuffles with emulation: https://www.google.com/search?q=ibm+sues+emulatorhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29 )
(3) IBM mainframes are expensive compared to commodity hardware
(4) Universities don't choose to run IBM mainframes
(5) A tiny minority of people coming out of university actually have experience
(6) Companies are worried about the lack of inexpensive employees with experience
They have amazing features in their OS's, for sure, but no amount of marketing budget makes up for "I can throw this on my PC in some fashion that I can learn about those features."
Bingo. And why you see the likes of Apple, Adobe and Microsoft bend over backwards to offer students deep discounts.
Heck, MS has been using their personal computing market share in their business sales pitches. This in the form of "total cost of ownership". More specifically that people will be accustomed to MS interfaces from their home use, and so less training is needed as new employees.
Many a recent discovery in science have been thanks to someone glancing over the mental partitions between fields of study and going "hey, i recognize that. We have a decade old solution for it".