Many vendors predict that firms will increasingly move to low-cost servers with standardised components. This may be good news for Intel and Microsoft. However, there is also a danger for them - once firms acquire servers and get them working well, history shows they are reluctant to abandon them to move to newer hardware.

Profit margins on the new breed of commodity servers will be thin, so if firms don't upgrade, vendors could be in trouble. The result may be that vendors will continually badger corporates to buy unnecessary new kit.

Of course, for corporates the new standardised servers are likely to be good news. The fundamental architecture is likely to stay the same for a long time, so it will become easier for firms to plan ahead. And once they have installed, optimised and honed a system until it does what their business requires, the last thing they will want to do is change it.

In fact, this attitude is why there are so many old systems out there, still working, and often still the mainstay of mission-critical applications. It's why companies such as HP still make good money out of supporting, refurbishing and remarketing old systems. And that is not just old HP servers. When it bought Compaq, HP also bought Digital, whose legacy systems still operate in many enterprises.

There is a wonderful irony in the fact that HP is currently trying to get owners of the supposedly long-dead Digital VAX systems to upgrade to remarketed AlphaServers, which themselves are obsolete. And perhaps HP realises this will be an uphill struggle, because it says it will also continue to support VAX systems through to 2010.

It is striking that the VAX reached the end of its product lifecycle at about the time NT4 came along, yet VAX systems will be supported long after Microsoft will have stopped supporting NT4 and probably Windows Server 2003 as well. In the real world, life moves a good deal slower than vendors would like.

The old systems just keep on working. For example, the oldest IBM mainframes I currently know about are in Turkey - a 4381-T92E and 9121-260 running OS/360. What is more, these are known about because Neon Systems - which develops tools that give real-time, online, web services capabilities to mission-critical mainframe batch processes - has been asked to provide Java-based interoperability for these systems. Here are applications written in Cobol and Adabas, running on an operating system for which TCP/IP capability was still dangerous science fiction, finding a real role in the web services world.

For the commodity server makers of the future, of course, this represents a problem. They want a high turnover of hardware, so they will want firms to upgrade ever more frequently.

History shows that firms don't like upgrading their servers too often. As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.