Thursday, September 17, 2026

@BrokenMoats Sep 17

Broken Moats on X

A few take aways from the $CRM Dreamforce keynote today.... It is difficult to watch at times with all of Marc's promotional showmanship but still worth it to understand how a bunch of legacy software companies are attempting to reposition themselves in terms of the AI era. The sell side will defend this tomorrow, thats the business they are in, but you should look at it for yourself unbiased. Ask yourself this first: .....you can claim SaaSpocalpyse over, the V shape rebound came, ARRs didn't plummet overnight.... That was never going to happen, the newspapers are still here, but their subscriber bases are decimated, or they moved online and the pricing models were drastically decreased. Reach potential increased, but so did competition (exponentially) and barriers to entry were and are radically lower then pre internet. If this was not existential and just a panic and the rebound is entirely justified why did the largest SaaS application company just remove their ui, conceded their metadatabase to their biggest competitor and is undergoing a pricing model change in real time, so change is upon us, time to look what happens next CRM going full force into being basically a database company now, hoping the underling data you built with salesforce over the years and the legacy connection will be enough to keep you around and paying them to essentially host your data for you with a Claude or other ai intelligence on top doing the work. Slack is the most relevant product they have and the biggest sticking point in those conversations, but how long will that last? Zoom should have died off by now, with Teams and others giving away video conferencing which shows you entrenched behaviors and a narrow network effect can defeat economic interests. Time will tell on slack. Ultimately I think a layer like snowflake that can tap data structured and unstructured across applications is the data layer and governance apparatus to build wrappers and dashboards from using multiple Ai models. Versus keeping the data siloed into the old applications from the prior generation and having to access them, or pay them all individually as databases and then building a mass MCP through all them to get to the unified data solution (much easier then ever before to migrate and move data the friction has dramatically been lowered). Seems a lot easier to have one data layer across an enterprise versus taking a salesforce, connecting it to Claude then having to connect that to Gong, granola, gmail, etc for your sales force and cs reps. Then creating channels with workday or paycom and connecting special channels for intuit and adp separately. And so on with each roles/departments specialized applications they use in a given day and giving database, governance, ai training, security etc and having to manage and permission all of these ai/database modules versus a central one stop shop with Databricks or snowflake (id say amazon or google, but no one is going to go all in on one cloud storage for outages and pricing reasons if large enough but I think they have a better argument/permission to win this space if they wanted to then Salesforce or worse a Paycom)....see the snowflake Q2 call to better understand their vision as competing to Marcs strategy laid out today. End of the day, I don't think when you look out three years these SaaS applications have the same relevancy in terms of users but more importantly on pricing (dropping the UI works for AI and looks cool in a demo, but it also erodes your brand and shared user behavior across organizations which was a piece of the stickiness of the solution over these SaaS years). CRM is likely better suited then most of the other applications ironically due to their largley paned at the time acquisition of Slack. I don't think it provides immunity but a solution to cling to in bundled conversations where their numbers may slow slightly less fast then some of their contemporaries. Point solutions continue to be first in line, communications too. These businesses are not impaired to zero today, but their pricing and expansion (new logo and NRR) that is going to be continued to be eroded. Newspapers are still here, magazines too but their subscription based was drastically hollowed out. My view is the SaaSapocalypse was directionally correct and narrative largely holds, the markets in short term may have over run with that theme (some single digit true ebitda multiples) but thats on old business models and we have largely filled the entire gaps to where its attractive to take the outlook of where these businesss are likely to head in the coming years again. They will show amped AI revenues (as they rename and push anything named AI for the sake of all other revenue and rename, bundle to get to say "AI revenues up 80%"....but total ARR, NRR still continue to be flat to declining), they are pushing duration and discounts to achieve this as they themselves scramble with ai models and solutions and rush to make with large over promises, and leave clients with messy solutions that frequently break, have real security issues, and underwhelm the capabilities the sales team pitched (I listen to this daily from my wife whose a cs manager at a software company, and the majority of my friends who work in software in various capacities).