They don’t make RAM, there’s only a very few companies that actually make the chips that go into RAM. Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung basically make up the entire market and they’re not afraid to use that to their advantage.
They’ve been literally convicted of price fixing in the past as a cartel.
Microsoft wants to kill on-prem for enterprise. Windows 11 Enterprise is a monthly subscription to your Office 365, sorry Microsoft 365, wait no Copilot 365 account. Exchange Server 2019 is the end with their subscription only version replacing it. They’re retiring Dynamics on prem to move you to the cloud.
The cloud services are parted out just right that you get almost everything you’re trying to do with one package, only to need the next level up at double the price for one little thing, or an add-on service that just so happens to need the E3 version instead of E1. Oh but you can pay twice as much again for the all-in-one bundle, it comes with everything! Expect that thing you need for regulatory compliance, that’s still extra. It’s like they studied the predatory pricing of freemium games and went “we can do better than that”
Selling you an OS once is of no interest to them. Monthly charges? Better but still not enough. All of your data flowing through their systems, ripe for harvesting and vendor lock-in? That’s the good stuff.
Vega and Radeon VII were a thing, but I doubt we’ll see the like again considering they were basically panicked attempts by AMD to find something that worked. At least their efforts with Zen 1/2 took off.