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The SaaSpocalypse
The eight-week repricing of early 2026 in which a trillion dollars of software industry value vanished — the financial signal that the AI turning point had arrived at sovereign speed and scale.
In the first eight weeks of 2026, a trillion dollars of market capitalization vanished from software companies. Workday fell thirty-five percent. Adobe lost a quarter of its value. Salesforce dropped twenty-five percent. Autodesk twenty-one. Figma nineteen. The market had identified a structural shift and was repricing accordingly, with the speed and brutality that financial markets bring to moments of paradigm transition. When Anthropic published a February 2026 blog post about Claude's ability to modernize COBOL, IBM suffered its largest single-day stock decline in more than a quarter century. The trigger was the recognition that AI had drained the moats around legacy software businesses overnight — and that the installation-phase distribution of value was being reordered at sovereign speed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The SaaSpocalypse is the financial signal of the AI turning point's arrival. In Perez's framework, it represents the installation-phase crisis — the moment when the speculative excess of the installation phase collides with the recognition