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The software industry is at an inflection point right now and I think…

The software industry is at an inflection point right now and I think most people are misreading what's actually happening. Everyone's talking about the SaaS apocalypse like it's the death of software. It's not. What's dying is the software-only business model. The companies that built their entire identity around charging hefty license fees for complex tools that clients had to learn, configure, manage, and ultimately struggle with. That era is over. But here's where the narrative gets misguided. The assumption underneath the SaaS apocalypse story is that clients want to build their own software instead. They don't. They never did. Nobody is sitting there thinking, "I wish I could spend six months building internal tools." What they want is a done-for-you outcome. They want to pay for results, not for access to software they have to figure out themselves. So what's actually emerging is a new breed of company. Not a SaaS business. Not a traditional services firm either. Something different. These companies are engineered with AI from the outset, which creates real efficiency and scale, but they're also bundling services alongside the technology. The client pays less overall because AI has compressed the cost of delivery. And because there are humans in the loop, the work actually gets done to spec rather than the client being left alone with a dashboard they don't understand. That combination is what clients are willing to pay for. Not licenses. Outcomes. Think about it from the client's side for a second. They don't want to learn complex software. They don't want to pay expensive license fees. They don't want to build their own tools. What they want is someone to say: give us the problem, we'll handle it, here's the result. The pricing reflects that. Pay for what you get, not for what you might theoretically do with a piece of software. The companies winning right now are the ones that figured this out early. AI as the engine, services as the wrapper, outcomes as the product. That's the model. It's not revolutionary in concept but the economics only work now because of how dramatically AI has changed the cost structure of delivery. Engineers are something like 100x more productive than they were even a year ago. That productivity improvement flows through the entire chain. Services that used to be expensive to deliver aren't anymore. Legacy SaaS incumbents are going to find this uncomfortable. Their whole pitch was that once you're on the platform, you stay on the platform. Switching costs were the moat. But if a new breed of company can deliver better outcomes at a lower all-in cost without asking you to change your behavior at all, that moat disappears fast. This isn't coming. It's already happening. The valuation drops in traditional SaaS companies aren't a blip. They're a signal.