The Great SaaS Unbundling

Where Software Value Actually Goes When Agents Arrive

In 1981, IBM launched the Personal Computer and accidentally created Microsoft. The hardware giant that dominated computing handed the most valuable layer - the operating system - to a software vendor it barely noticed. IBM kept making computers. Microsoft owned the platform.

The mistake wasn’t technical. IBM understood computers better than anyone. The mistake was assuming value stayed in the same place when the stack changed. They thought hardware would remain the high ground. They were wrong.

Last Monday, software stocks lost $285 billion in a single trading session. The trigger was Anthropic releasing plugin updates for their Claude agent product. Not a new model. Not a major technical breakthrough. Just plugins that let AI agents interact with business systems more directly.

Wall Street looked at those plugins and realized something uncomfortable: if agents can execute workflows through APIs, maybe the UI layer that’s captured most software value for twenty years isn’t the product anymore.