SaaS also covers all kind of legal requirements (accessibility, auditing, security, payment handling, and so on), and has someone to support, blame, and come and fix it when things go sour. Plus the architecture to cover scaling needs.
With some thing Claude churned, you're on your own.
I hear this argument constantly about SaaS. In my experience, it's hard to get support without paying through your ass, and the fixes are slow if they come at all. Also, based on statements from Salesforce and others, SaaS will also become some thing Claude churned out.
Was it ever an asset? I write software and I see my job as trying to write the least amount of software possible, because in reality, more lines of code means more time writing, reviewing, and maintaining. More bugs that may be possible, more work in general for features that people might never use. Software was never an asset, it's a liability. It's a means to an end. The real product is the service.
If a company has software engineers to take care of that, I can see them preferring an in-house solution. What I don't see are e.g. lawyers, accountants, or physicians, spending their time asking their LLM to solve a bug in their own platform instead of just hiring that service.
The deeper thing is this: the traditional economics of software - the idea that building software creates an asset - is breaking.
Especially when the economy goes shock after shock unrelated to AI too (tarrifs, a bad economy, unpredictable White House tennants, fears of war).
Valuations are fickle and can reverse course just as well as continue it.
The "deeper thing" is mostly taking what the article says for granted, when it hasn't been happening in any real scale. No real movement of companies getting rid of their Salesforce or Microsoft suite or such just yet - a handful of cherry-picked examples that might have replaced some smaller SaaS with a custom thing with different degrees of success.
