[root-z]

It's quite common in the cloud industry to trade hardware for shorter development cycle these days too. I think that's because there is still very high growth in the sector and companies all want to be the first offering feature X. As cloud services become more mature I expect people will be more cost sensitive. Though when that will happen I cannot say.

[nicoburns]

I think it's largely because deceloper time is so expensive. Hardware seems cheap in comparison in many contexts.