[ericbarrett]

My sense is that storage server prices have had to come down to compete with both cloud (like S3 archival tiers) and roll-your-own solutions. The former are relatively recent and the latter have become more feasible as companies—Backblaze among them—have open sourced well-engineered designs. Storage server margin used to be insane, over 80% after COGS back in the 00s and only slightly less last decade, and there's still room to compete.

[hinkley]

I hope history will eventually read something like this:

In the aftermath of the Dot Com Bust, manufacturers became conservative, and lost their ability to dream big. Into this power vacuum stepped the so called Cloud Providers, who in some cases made their own hardware and tools to solve their problems.

Over time manufacturing caught up, missing tools were written, and the Cloud providers went back to solving the main problem nearly none of their customers of suppliers could ever solve: the speed of light (locality).