Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java

Literally today I was checking out of a rental car center and the checkout person loaded up an emulated green screen mainframe program to complete the process.

I know for sure that Avis's reservation system runs on mainframe.

To me, that means that the business logic of rental car checkout and return is so complicated and/or nuanced, it is cheaper for rental car companies to find/retain mainframe developers to keep these running than it would be to re-platform onto commodity hardware.

Also, given that basically every industry is powered by a handful of mainframes, it is surprising that COBOL/Fortran developers aren't making insane money like I thought they were.

It's cheaper to threaten their families.

I doubt the rental car system is complex. It was probably written decades ago and is now complete and bug-free. Keeping it running on a mainframe with emulated terminals is far cheaper than a modern rewrite, and the age/maintainability of their software is the least of their concerns.

I helped a client with some dependencies on Avis and a few other car rental companies a while ago. They indeed have some really old, clunky software. At least judging from the data dumps I had to work with. Also some notable differences in the quality of the data between different providers that I had to work with.

There are plenty of new mobility startups managing just fine without any Cobol or other legacy software. The issue companies like Avis have isn't their software but their lack of competitiveness and ambition level. The car rental business is always changing and they have to somehow adapt with it. And they struggle with that. It's not their software that holds them back but their dependence on things not changing. The software is just a reflection of how uncompetitive they are.