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I'm sure in the right application Optane had a place. The marketing people couldn't explain why I needed it, and I haven't found a use for it.

I'm not wholly convinced established organisational practises are wholly compatible with non-volatile RAM. Working copy of a document? Put it on a shared drive. Volatile copy actually being processed? Put it in local RAM.

A non-volatile, non-shared resource's purpose is somewhat unclear; beyond trying to accelerate boot times. Chucking "RAM" up as shared resources to a server cluster might have uses. But then you're limited by the network interconnect; so no advantage particularly to having your storage on the RAM bus.

What does booting from Optane do that booting from a solid state disk over a decent interface doesn't do? RAM bus speed advantage over PCI-express I suppose. Even PCI-express3 has enormous bandwidth of course.

Security concerns for persistent RAM are also a thing. The idea that RAM could be a place where malware could reside, persistent through even a complete power cycle is slightly disturbing for some applications.

So, yes, well done for Intel for trying new ideas, but they need to be able to explain why someone might want one for it to stick.