Intel are the problem
There are a number of things here.
It was developed by Intel, they have not got a clue how to talk to people, so they dumb stuff down and sell Optane as hard disk replacement (this is the first time I have seen a proper explanation of what was intended). They over promise (I remember 1000x faster that current disks). They develop stuff so slowly (discrete graphics cards anyone) they get bypassed by more mature technology by the time they get it to market (NAND just got faster and cheaper, they just had an SSD that had no USP) and the DIMM stuff just didn't turn up any time soon, was almost as expensive as RAM (which keeps dropping in price) and only ones that could afford it were enterprise and they didn't see the benefit of persistent middle tier storage that complicated things as servers are always on. They were the only ones selling it.
If they could have been at least price competitive with or at least 5x faster that NAND then they may have been able to make a case for it, or licenced it out to HP on the cheap to develop systems to support it say alongside SAP or some of those big Oak ridge super computers, no wait they screwed that relationship with Itanium another good idea looking for a problem to solve.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
