This is arguably about an un(der?)regulated futures market gone wild. If you can buy all the production for the year, before it’s even been produced, you’re going to create a shortage. One could argue that supply and demand is out of whack and that more fabs = more supply to meet demand, but if Western Digital completely sold out of hard drives when we’re only 1/6 of the way through the year then more supply isn’t really the way to fix it.
This is a really interesting point. It seems to suggest that the self-organising property of markets isn’t just from supply & demand, but also requires some other conditions (that demand is widely distributed politically? or in space & time?) and that any market with a sufficiently wealthy actor loses its predictive power, because they can destroy those conditions whenever it benefits them.
Doesn’t even seem to be related to the fact that they had exclusive purchase rights. Lacking that, you could buy far in the future after everyone else has put in their orders.
Supply and demand hold where there is competition within and across all the market layers. This has rarely held in IT and the hardware market has always had these problems at smaller scales where the capacity of suppliers or demand is so skewed that certain actors on the market have to be appeased at the cost of long term health of the industry.
That is to say we had ample warning that was ignored.
This is arguably about an un(der?)regulated futures market gone wild. If you can buy all the production for the year, before it’s even been produced, you’re going to create a shortage. One could argue that supply and demand is out of whack and that more fabs = more supply to meet demand, but if Western Digital completely sold out of hard drives when we’re only 1/6 of the way through the year then more supply isn’t really the way to fix it.
This is a really interesting point. It seems to suggest that the self-organising property of markets isn’t just from supply & demand, but also requires some other conditions (that demand is widely distributed politically? or in space & time?) and that any market with a sufficiently wealthy actor loses its predictive power, because they can destroy those conditions whenever it benefits them.
Doesn’t even seem to be related to the fact that they had exclusive purchase rights. Lacking that, you could buy far in the future after everyone else has put in their orders.
Supply and demand hold where there is competition within and across all the market layers. This has rarely held in IT and the hardware market has always had these problems at smaller scales where the capacity of suppliers or demand is so skewed that certain actors on the market have to be appeased at the cost of long term health of the industry.
That is to say we had ample warning that was ignored.