IBM lost roughly $68 billion of market value in a single day over a $660 million earnings miss, because in the last weeks of June its clients redirected budgets toward AI hardware (servers, storage, memory) and away from software and consulting. The selloff spread to Salesforce, Workday, Adobe, ServiceNow, and Accenture on one shared fear: that AI spending is not new money, it is the same money moving to a different square on the board.

Stephen Forte argues this was a chess move, not just an investment story. The same week IBM fell, the chipmakers raised guidance. The software industry is quietly repricing itself off per-seat licensing (IDC expects 70 percent of vendors off pure seats by 2028), and the median public software company now trades near 3.4 times revenue, down from about 18 times five years ago. The part that reaches a mid-size  ...