There is no plan.

I keep seeing posts about how big tech companies are deliberately driving up the price of GPUs, RAM, and other PC components in order to destroy the home computer market and force us all into dumb terminal/thin clients connected to those same companies’ cloud services. 

I don’t buy it.

Maybe that will end up being a result of what’s happening right now, but I think that attributing it to a deliberate and coordinated plan is assuming too much. I think all of these companies are in an utter panic because they have hooked themselves to a train that can never stop until it crashes, and they see no way to get off. The Next Big Thing has to always be just around the corner or right over the hill, with the only way to get there being to keep spending, keep growing, keep going faster and faster.

To be clear, I don’t mean this post as any sort of reassurance, or as a pollyanna-ish insistence that things aren’t as bad as they seem. I think it might actually be better if all the bad stuff in the world were the result of evil geniuses with master plans. At least then there would be someone to point at and specific levers of change to pull.