We danced around it all week. We called out the many culprits for Salesforce's weak quarterly results on Wednesday — and subsequent stock plunge — including an elongated sales cycle, a measured economic environment, and the need for more senior executives to check off on products. But one we didn't call out was the law of large numbers, which says that as a company gets bigger, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain its previous growth rates.
You can storm the gates if you have enough AI — think Elon Musk's start-up xAI — but not if you have a software as a service for anything except, perhaps, cybersecurity. Now before I go too far here, before I consign this group to a P/E multiple of 20, let's talk about what it really does and is doing: It's forcing us to go elsewhere. SaaS is another form of enterprise software, is another form of applications software, is another form of kryptonite.