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Why software stocks are getting pummelled

economist.com

21–30 of 285 posts

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#21
post #7
post #5

Software will be easy to create, which will kill moats and margins on existing products. The game is up for pure saas. Smart money started pricing this in one year ago

For a lot of SaaS firms, a big part of their value is the domain knowledge and best practices encoded in the software. Current AIs often do a bad job of that. Sure, they know a lot of it. But they also get a lot of it wrong, and can’t tell the difference between genuinely good advice, and advice that sounds good but is practically worthless or even harmful. (Of course I’m biased since I work for a SaaS firm. But I’m…

ai will know the domain knowledge

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#22

> The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves. AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

cost will go down 70-90%

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#24
post #4

QQQ is up 20% over the last year. GOOG is up 70% over the last year. "Pummelled" seems extremely sensational...

Some 7-15% down in a trading day is a lot for an established corporation. I consider Salesforce dropping 7% without some obvious trigger to be at least somewhat newsworthy, and from the first sentences in the article I get the impression that The Economist is sitting on more examples like that.

A lot of people are tense about the AI venture ouroboros and what it might mean for future software, especially people with money and little to no experience actually deploying software.

Edit: At the time I saw some memes claiming that roughly 1.5 trillion dollars in market value had evaporated, which if true is not a small sum.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#25
post #5

Software will be easy to create, which will kill moats and margins on existing products. The game is up for pure saas. Smart money started pricing this in one year ago

Was the hard part ever really the software, though? It's the Service part of SaaS that seems to provide the moat. Lock-in, habits, workflows, integrations, and trust. And don't discount the appeal of making some part of your operations "someone else's problem." Could you hire engineers or use an LLM to make your own Google Docs? Probably, yeah, but would that be worth the headache of being responsible for a bespoke i…

> Could you hire engineers or use an LLM to make your own Google Docs

Or you can just ask your LLM to install https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online

Between open source, LLMs, and SaaS vendors getting greedy and privacy invasive, the total pain minimization calc might shift for some orgs.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#26
What an odd article that is just designed to hype the software creation aspect, which doesn't really affect MAGAF.

MSFT went down because of overexposure in AI and because it is clear that people do not want it.

AI weariness is a thing, and if people go off the Internet or advertisers question whether humans or AI swarms are "watching" their ads it is over for the big players.

Trying to salvage the situation by hyping the relatively small code generation (theft) aspect is quite a poor analysis.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#27

> The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves. AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

cost will go down 70-90%

SaaS margins too.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#28

> The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves. AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

Stock prices are very forward looking, so if half the hype being sold about AI is true I would expect most software-centric companies to be devalued by wall-street (as the test, deploy, support should be automated in the coming years...according to the AI CEO's).

However, if I was a wall street analyst and believed the AI dreams I would further be concerned that software companies aren't taking advantage of the last remnants of value before software (and maybe labor) values go to zero.

If you've got a gold mine and have recently built the most efficient shovels in the world, why are they not bringing in mass amounts of workers to utilize these shovels before all the neighboring mines. Once all that gold is on the market, the price crashes so it's better to be one of the first mines to get in and dig out all possible value first.

I think you either don't believe in the AI hype, which means a lot of silicon valley companies are tremendously overvalued. Or you do, in which case another huge part of silicon valley is overvalued especially when they are not looking to out-innovate their peers (as evidenced by downsizing), but just riding the wave of AI until what they are selling has no marginal value over some guy coding alone in his bedroom. SV is putting itself into a weird position, but still has some time for financial buffoonery before the party stops.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#30
post #5

Software will be easy to create, which will kill moats and margins on existing products. The game is up for pure saas. Smart money started pricing this in one year ago

Was the hard part ever really the software, though? It's the Service part of SaaS that seems to provide the moat. Lock-in, habits, workflows, integrations, and trust. And don't discount the appeal of making some part of your operations "someone else's problem." Could you hire engineers or use an LLM to make your own Google Docs? Probably, yeah, but would that be worth the headache of being responsible for a bespoke i…

You might think you can, for a while. Been there, done that. But you probably can not do so sustainably in most cases. Even if you could, would you really be better off building vs. buying? Outsourcing development, operations, and maintenance is almost always the better choice, letting you focus on the things you do uniquely, differentiably, or meaningfully better.

"We have this awesome internal version of Docs that we're responsible for fixing, upgrading, and doing support for" is not the flex "AI can code anything!" aficionados think it is. Especially when you also have similar internal versions of Sheets, Jira, Slack, GitHub, Linux, Postgres, and 100 other tools.

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