Joseph Schumpeter
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The trillion dollars vanished before anyone had time to build a theory about why.
Eight weeks into 2026, the SaaS industry lost more market value than most countries produce in a year. Workday, Adobe, Salesforce — names that had defined the architecture of modern business — watched their stock prices crater. The financial press called it the SaaSpocalypse. The analysts scrambled for models. And I sat in a hotel room thinking: someone already explained this. In 1942.
Joseph Schumpeter never saw a computer. He died before the word "software" entered common usage. But he built the most precise instrument I have ever encountered for understanding what happens when a new capability renders an entire economic structure obsolete — not gradually, not politely, but with the force of what