Hazy Memory

Who’s to blame for the memory crisis that turned Macs and Steam Boxes into unobtanium this week? The memory-makers have a convenient answer.If I was Micron and everyone was hating on my company for making life just a little more unaffordable, I might try looking for a scapegoat, too.But given how little the RAM folks have stuck their necks out in the year of the RAM crisis, this quote from a recent Wall Street Journal story was nonetheless revealing:In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in…