[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]what does a software company have to do with memory prices....I am a little confused[/citation]
A lot actually. The transitions of bloatware in Ram requirement and Ram usage moving from each version of Windows was HUGE until Win7 came out. I mean we went from a few hundred KB of ram needed in 3.1 to several MB of ram in win95. By the time we hit winXP you needed a minimum of 512MB of ram for things to run properly (though more was always welcome), and then we hit Vista which would run on 1GB of ram, but really needed 2GB. Win7 could run fine on 1GB, but will run a little better with 2GB. Finally with Windows 8 you need 2GB of ram to run effectively, but 4+GB is really suggested.
At any rate, the demand for system memory increasing 2 fold between early versions of Windows kept ram a lucritive business to be in. But then Vista came in the picture requiring a 4x increase in ram usage. Vista required so much more Ram than what was affordable at the time that ram manufacturers had a race to the bottom to see who could provide the most ram the cheapest. But when win7 came out, requiring less Ram to run effectively, people got use to the idea of cheap memory, and so the prices never went back up. With DDR3 prices actually went down because the die shrinks involved finally made bulk memory manufacturing affordable again.
But now we are nearing the end of the life cycle for DDR3, and like the end of DDR2 manufacturers are hitting maximum yields at a minimum price. Win8 needs no more memory than the OS that came out ~6 years ago which keeps demand static per unit. The desktop market is nearly saturated (the real reason there is no PC market growth... not some silly tablet revolution) so the demand is not there. There is a huge market to add more memory to phones, but the battery hit from having extra active memory, as well as the sheer number of apps that can run in 2GB of ram which all need power, makes manufacturers not want to do it.
So really, they are in a tight spot until DDR4 comes out in 2 years (really just over 1 year, but it will be 2 years before platforms become available). With DDR4 we get another die shrink, which should allow for 16GB sticks of ram, or at least make 8GB sticks normal. This die shrink also will make for higher yields per area, plus the use of larger wafers will make chips even cheaper. Plus we will see much lower power usage, which will make the phone and tablet industry more interested in putting 2-4GB of ram in devices without worry, which will increase demand further.
But really, that is it. Not to sound like certain other futureistic nay-sayers, but once you hit the 4-8GB of system memory, there is very little that you cannot do anymore. 8GB is more than enough ram for 99.9% of workloads. I mean, I have 16GB, and intend to get 32GB in a little while, but it is just for the kicks of having it, and I am only using ~3GB of it in day to day use. Even right now with win8 and several apps and browser tabs I am at 2.8GB in use. Due to the fast random load times of SSDs you no longer have to have nearly as much ram on hand for things like photo and video editing either, as most things can be spooled from the disk in real time. It is truly a weird time for ram makers to be able to make so much ram... while programs tend to need less and less of it.
The one area where Ram could baloon though: Video games! Look as how far games have gotten visuially with 2GB of video ram available! It is incredible how lifelike things have gotten with such relatively limited amounts of program space. Now imagine a world where consoles have 4-8GB of ram, and where desktops can have substantially more... no more repeated/tiled textures, much higher resolution backgrounds, support for substantially higher resolution monitors (retina will come to the desktop environment eventually)... all of these things need massive amounts of Ram that have been previously unavailable, but are quite possible when you have systems with 2-4GB of VRam and 8-16GB of system memory. We have high expectations for next gen consoles, mostly in how their limited games will look on PC hardware which is capable of real time ray tracing and life-like textures.
But again, once you hit 16GB of ram, there is little motive to go beyond that. unless we change our model to use actual Ram drives instead of SSDs for file/program storage.