[arielweisberg]

So what happened that isn't shown in most analysis of RAM costs is that RAM didn't go down in cost that much for many people. For instance RAM in the cloud is still very expensive.

What is also not shown is that cold data is everywhere. You need to have it, but paying to put it in RAM generates zero value for a profit seeking business. So if you don't page out cold data you effectively throw yourself out of the running for a huge swath of use cases.

For a small deployment sure it's dwarfed by engineering costs. But infrastructure per engineering head count is trending towards more infrastructure per head and infrastructure cost matters to more businesses.

The other thing is that data volumes are also increasing at a rate competitive with RAM is decreasing in price. This is because there are new opportunities to make money using more data and this is a trend you can't really beat. The more data you can have the more use cases and lines of business get invented.

This is not a scientific analysis it's just conjecture based on anecdata from my time in the industry.