In manufacturing you have mass. Stuff has weight to it and sometimes I think it would be best to imagine data has mass.

In the widget factory there is the option to put stuff in the warehouse until you need it. Great in principle, but if you are the guy having to do the heavy lifting to get stuff crammed into the warehouse, and retrieved, then you can end up wondering why you are in the job, which promised so much more than spending all day in the warehouse rather than making stuff.

With web applications we will gladly get gigabytes of stuff from the other side of the world, just in case we need it. If all of that data weighed grams or even tonnes, then we would do things very differently, to be more like the Toyota Way, with just-in-time and the rest of it.

Hence my suggestion when building for the web, imagine every byte has mass. Design accordingly.