Well if you think about it just about any innovative technology is going to have extremely high costs up front. Energy efficient cars are only slowly coming down in costs because demand is finally climbing high enough. These overall costs discussed are rather skewed towards existing technologies because of course, mass producing a couple tracks is rather easy now. Think about running those lines a hundred years ago where it was all done by laborers crafting steel.

I bet you won't find any RDRAM in the servers churning out all these old emails.