On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to computational needs, than by assuming that every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters.
These are large, highly profitable vertical markets.
The above remark is demonstrably foolish and ignorant.
Can you be highly available without making money?
And btw I've worked in both the industries you cite. It's hard to think of telecomms having amazing uptime when you have to write a restart script for a core security daemon because the sysadmin doesn't know how.
Making money and being highly available often different goals.
My biggest career horror was realizing how much the medical informatics concepts have been structured around billing and insurance rather than scientific, biomedical requirements.
Reality: embedded systems are a thing. And there's (lots of!) money in that business too. There's maaaany applications where some (fixed) amount of compute does the job, and the simplest/cheapest device that does it wins out.
I've worked in embedded, and chips, and embedded chips for most of my career.
> There's maaaany applications where some (fixed) amount of compute does the job, and the simplest/cheapest device that does it wins out.
There's usually quite a bit factored in for slop in these days, because time-to-market is a thing. There's also sometimes a cost-reduction stage (yeah, I've been involved in cost reductions where a penny a unit was awesome), but you don't bother doing the cost-reduction phase unless you have the volume to support it.
Warren Buffet famously said that "Concentration builds wealth, diversification preserves it."
In much of computing, even embedded, demos and prototypes build a product, and the right-sizing of everything to make it even more profitable happens later, if it is worth it.