I am still trying to work out what Teams is "setting up for me" when it takes several seconds from opening the bookmark in my browser to having a UI where I can read the chats. It's running on a PC that can render complex graphical scenes in real time but it takes half a minute to see "LGTM!". (Shaking head emoji goes here.)

Then again Teams is still barely an amateur compared to the incomprehensible slowness of Jira.

I hesitate to post this here but I'm not sure Stripe hasn't become most of those things as well now. It's obviously been very successful and I'm happy for the people who built such a useful service in the early years. But I also mourn the loss of the tidy product, transparent pricing, clear documentation, and legendary support that made it exceptional back then.

Market forces have not been sufficient because the funny money moving around in the AI sector is starting to significantly damage other parts of the economy. I'm not sure how I can say this any more clearly.

If the AI sector wants to take a big risk that either pays off or it doesn't then that's one thing. If the danger is contained and the people taking the risks are the only ones who will suffer if things don't work out then that's their choice. The important point is that the danger in this case is not contained. It's not just the AI sector being affected now. It's not just the people choosing to take the risk in the hope of a big profit who are being harmed.

I don't think it's realistic any longer to treat this as some sort of short term supply-and-demand problem with luxury products. It's been building up for several years already. We're seeing public statements from some of the big companies involved that already run through 2026 and beyond that imply the supply chain situation continuing to worsen for everyone else. And the components in question are now necessary for a lot of normal operations and day-to-day life.

If we just wait and see for another 2-3 years as some are suggesting then in the meantime real businesses who were operating responsibly and doing nothing wrong will be failing to grow as they should, putting up prices for their customers, letting staff go, or even failing completely. Governments will be redirecting tax revenues to basic IT infrastructure instead of public services. People who just wanted to buy a normal device for their own personal use won't be able to afford one or maybe to find one at all and their quality of life will fall.

I can see no reason why we should allow these harmful outcomes just because some already rich VCs and some AI tech bros are playing games at the scale of the global economy to try to sustain the unrealistic valuations of the big tech companies for their own benefit. It's increasingly unlikely to work anyway and it's a realistic possibility that the bubble will burst this year so trying to contain the fallout from that as much as possible instead of allowing the bubble to inflate even further is not a bad idea either.

Why not? The point of regulation is to fix things when market forces haven't been sufficient. You keep talking about winners and losers but it's unclear to me who you think is actually winning in this situation.

The "scale might be different" matters quite a lot in this case. We're not just talking about demand slightly outpacing supply and resulting in prices going up 10%. We're talking about large parts of our societies and economies no longer having reliable access to technology that we now depend on for normal operation.

We wouldn't allow any amount of investor money to buy out essential utilities and then exploit their natural monopolies to charge the public 10x as much for access to water or electricity.

We wouldn't allow any amount of investor money to buy out all the companies that maintain our roads or rail networks and then charge 10x the established prices for maintaining that infrastructure.

We wouldn't allow any amount of investor money to buy out all the phone networks and then deny people access to communication because they didn't pay some exorbitant protection fee.

No-one thinks regulation of these markets and interference with these kinds of corporate transactions is a crazy idea. Why do so many people here apparently think we should let the funny money funded AI giants distort the entire global tech supply chain in the hope that their silly valuations won't come crashing down for a bit longer?

We can't afford to wait "several years" to see whether the invisible hand will fix the problem. The markets have already allowed this situation to develop over a period of several years. The damage is too severe and it's happening right now and it's getting worse. Governments need to start swinging the regulatory axe now.