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The SaaSpocalypse as Disruption Case
The 2025–2026 repricing of the software industry — when AI-generated custom tools triggered a trillion dollars of lost market value — read through Christensen's framework as a textbook low-end disruption unfolding at compressed speed.
The SaaSpocalypse, documented in You On AI, is the most consequential application of Christensen's framework to a contemporary event. Between December 2025 and February 2026, approximately one trillion dollars of market value evaporated from enterprise software companies as the market recognized that AI-generated custom tools were displacing the overserving-platform business model. Workday fell thirty-five percent. Adobe lost a quarter of its value. Salesforce dropped twenty-five percent. When Anthropic published a blog post about Claude's ability to modernize COBOL, IBM suffered its largest single-day stock decline in more than a quarter century. The pattern Christensen documented in disk drives and steel was unfolding in software — compressed from two decades into eight weeks.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The structural conditions for disruption were present and accumulating for years before the threshold was crossed. Enterprise SaaS platforms had overserved their customers through relentless feature accumulation. The median user of an enterprise platform used between