Expense isn't a problem when you have a multibillion dollar company who wrote their own filesystem to use custom designed free software on custom designed low power servers redundantly spanning over cheap disks in energy efficient custom datacenters and no uptime guarantees.

For most companies a new Exchange cluster backed by RAID SCSI disks and a backup system upgrade isn't a trivial cost.

Edit: yes, Google did it cheaper, but that's not because IT people were lying, misleading or dismissing - it really is expensive to do 'properly'.

This has nothing to do with technology. It's all 70's as all the rest.

it's all politics.