SaaS is dead
The horizontal middle dies. Infrastructure lives.
I have spent a big chunk of my career helping companies select, implement and optimize software, and I know exactly why SaaS won: building good software was expensive, slow, specialized and risky, so most companies had no rational choice but to buy the closest available thing and adapt themselves around it. That assumption is gone.
Most companies have somebody who could handle the vision. Almost none of them are willing to do the second part.
BE PRECISE
What lives
I mean something more aggressive than the walk-back people expect, not less. Infrastructure lives — I am running on BigQuery, I am not writing a database. Deep vertical software with real domain knowledge baked into it lives. Anything with a genuine regulatory or network moat lives.
WHAT DIES
The generic customer object
What dies is the horizontal middle: the generic platform that sells the same customer object to a soda company, a dental group and a logistics firm, and quietly asks all three to pretend their businesses are the same shape. That entire category exists because building your own was irrational. It is not irrational anymore. And the horizontal middle is where most of the money is.
HOW IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS
A demotion, not a bankruptcy
The platform does not die. It gets moved down a tier and paid like a utility, and the seat at the head of the table goes to something you own. Once you can build exactly what you need around your own business, your own customers and your own data, the value moves somewhere else — the customer base, the data, the operating history, the brand, the distribution, the physical product, and the person who knows what all of it actually means. Those are the things you cannot recreate in a weekend. The software itself stops being the moat and starts being the exhaust.
SO WHY IS NOBODY DOING IT
The excuse expired and everybody kept using it
Not because it is hard to build. Because the scarce input moved and most companies are still staring at the old one. Engineering capacity used to be the constraint; now it is domain judgment that can point the tooling somewhere worth pointing it. Those are not the same skill, they rarely live in the same person, and no vendor can sell you the second one. What is left is not capability. It is vision and will.