EVENT
The SaaSpocalypse
The 2026 trillion-dollar repricing of the software industry — read through Shapiro's framework as a predictable value migration event rather than an industry death, with specific consequences for the concentration of economic power.
By February 2026, a trillion dollars of market capitalization had vanished from software companies. Workday fell thirty-five percent. Adobe lost a quarter of its value. Salesforce dropped twenty-five percent. IBM suffered its largest single-day stock decline in more than a quarter century. The market named the event with characteristic bluntness: the SaaSpocalypse. Shapiro's framework interprets the event not as industry death but as value migration — the standard consequence of commoditization in information markets, accelerated to a speed that made the standard process feel catastrophic.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The economic mechanism is decomposition. The value of a SaaS company can be separated into two components. Code value: the market's assessment of the cost of reproducing the software the company provides. Ecosystem value: the market's assessment of the data, integrations, institutional knowledge, workflow dependencies, compliance infrastructure, and switching costs the company has accumulated over years of enterprise deployment. Before AI, the distinction was academic — the