There Are Always More of Them Before They Are Counted

Drawing on historical parallels from the carriage-to-automobile transition and radio's survival against television, this piece argues that the so-called 'SaaSpocalypse' is real but overstated. While AI genuinely threatens SaaS companies with no proprietary data moat and easily automatable workflows, enterprise software vendors with deep workflow integration, compliance requirements, and years of structured domain data face far higher switching costs than the market panic implies. The key question for SaaS leaders is not whether AI will disrupt their category, but which of their capabilities — data assets, distribution, workflow entanglement — transfer into the AI era, and which were only defensible when the cost of intelligence was high.