I also don't particularly like the technology (morally/ethically) because of what it says about what our country and tech in particular prioritizes.
So huge disclaimer aside that I'm biased and find it disgusting...
Technically... we will see I suppose, I just haven't seen anything very useful personally yet. There are some cool automations I imagine you could come up with and it might (tiny possibility) have a market with the kinds of people that already find stuff like Siri/Hands free useful. Not sure you'd ever turn a profit, but building it into your platform as a large tech co. you might find some adopters.
On the other hand...I can totally see it ruining the internet and a bunch of other stuff I enjoy.
Maybe as like a fancy playwright or testing platform it could be useful, but I'm not a web programmer so I'm really not the right person to speculate on that.
Everyone involved in building these things has to have some amount of hubris. Its going to come smashing down on them. What's going unsaid in all of this is just how swiftly the tide has turned against this tech industry attempt to save itself from a downtrend.
The whole industry at this point is acting like the tobacco industry back when they first started getting in hot water. No doubt the prophecies about imminent AGI will one day look to our descendents exactly like filters on cigarettes. A weak attempt to prevent imminent regulation and reduced profitability as governments force an out of control industry to deal with the externalities involved in the creation of their products.
If it wasn't abundantly clear...I agree with you that AGI is infinitely far away. Its the damage that's going to be caused by sociopaths (Sam Altman at the top of the list) in attempting to justify the real things they want (money) in their march towards that impossible goal that concerns me.
On the contrary, the maintenance and continued improvement of an entire ISA and ISA specific operating systems is exactly my idea of hardcore tech, i.e. continuing to pay a chip org to design new chips for said ISA every generation and implement new instructions...and continuing to pay OS and compiler programmers to work those into their OS's and compilers...I'm not sure where we draw the line on maintenance vs. continued development here, but I'm not sure I'd call that purely maintenence.
There really aren't a lot of companies out there that can claim to do similar (and of course besides s390x, an ancient and venerable CISC, IBM also has Power, so they are doing this 2x over). You'll find a lot of IBM employees contributing to what I'd consider "hardcore" tech like LLVM and the Linux kernel as a result, because they genuinely have a large amount of expertise in those and similar areas. And here I'm not even really including Red Hat, but if you include them then they are even more overweight in the hardcore tech category.
If anything, a lot of the rest of the tech industry has left "hardcore tech" behind due to efficiency concerns as a result of a longrunning industry wide process of consolidation and commodification that IBM has resisted for obvious reasons. IBM is hardcore to a fault if anything.
TLDR: I actually think IBM punches above their weight in the "hardcore tech" area so long as our definition is sufficiently low level rather than say, cloud services, in which case fair enough you can probably fairly say they suck at that.
Here I've also chosen to entirely ignore IBM research.
I think you really ought to justify your use of the terminology "natural monopoly". To the extent that such a thing exists, is this not exactly what we have anti-trust laws to prevent?
It seems to me that we can, have, and should punish people for success if that success is likely to lead to well known kinds of market failure, and that such a policy is generally non-controversial outside of the most extreme forms of libertarian political philosophies (which unfortunately, are disproportionately prevalent in big tech and likely to get the whole industry in serious hot water).
Certainly, you could make the same "natural monopoly" argument against just about every serious anti-trust action that has taken place in the past. It didn't work then and I don't think its going to work now.
Pretending that closed platforms that exist on computer networks (and are not themselves networks) somehow makes this all different is not very convincing. Network effects, as we've come to understand the term, are not new, and have existed before computer networks. To the extent they exist, it's evidence of need for intervention because of a clear failure of a market to self regulate (what some may call a "natural" or just a regular monopoly) and maintain a competitive market, not evidence that everything is okay.
I also seriously take issue with the idea that Google provides an "essential service". Power, food, water, and you could make an argument for computer and communications infrastructure, are "essential". Google search is not. If it disappeared, society would soldier on and we would all be fine. At worst it would be a minor inconvenience for users and a headache for IT departments and developers.
The benefit to learning s390x assembler over others is that there are actually still experts around that program entirely in the macro assembler, and environments that still expect or require it (technically, its a solved problem to link against the assembler code from Metal C, but all the docs and APIs are specified entirely in assembler for much of the low level OS internals, and you really do need to know it to work with it in any significant professional capacity).
Its tough to learn on x86 or ARM, because there has been a lot of standardization towards C, and that is sorta the expected low level API/ABI even at the kernel level in 2024. Calling conventions have been standardized, and really very little actual programming is done manually in assembly these days. So its sort of artificial trying to learn assembly on those ISAs these days. Certainly there are not many APIs specified in assembly. Perhaps one exception would be compiler/linker backends, but that is a whole other can of worms you've gotta learn if you go that route.
IBM Z is different in that respect. It makes it probably a more difficult and unwieldy platform overall if you just wanna make a quick app and ship (why I'm not advocating you all go out and buy mainframes lol), but for learning how to program assembler "in the real world", its the last bastion of a much older school of programming and a great learning environment that will challenge some of the assumptions you maybe have picked up that actually come from Unix or C and not the ISAs themselves.
Its also, in my humble opinion, a pretty nice macro assembler to actually work with. Its had a lot of development over the years (perhaps as a result of it remaining a significant force in the systems programming world for mainframes long after similar programming interfaces were quietly retired on newer platforms), and so I quite like the actual assembler itself, now known as IBM HLASM.
I tend to recommend newcomers pick up a free pdf book from here by the esteemed John Ehrman (RIP)