CRM
Salesforce, Inc.
stock NYSE

Adobe, TTD, CRM

Have you used Jira or Confluence? IMO the moat is quite small for a software company compared to the likes of CRM and ADBE

Software stocks aren’t doomed, but the “easy money for any SaaS with a slide deck” era is. Your point about code being a commodity is right, but that mostly hits thin wrappers and point tools, not platforms with entrenched workflows, integrations, and compliance muscle.
What I’m watching is who actually owns a mission‑critical workflow plus proprietary data. Adobe with creative assets, Salesforce with CRM + ecosystem, CSU with vertical software and switching costs – that stuff doesn’t get blown up by a cheaper AI clone overnight. The compression in EV/FCF for those names looks more like a regime shift in expectations than a broken business.
The real risk is incumbents under‑monetizing AI while newer players use it to eat the low end (think how HubSpot keeps pushing upmarket, or how tools like Zapier and Pulse for Reddit quietly become infrastructure for GTM teams). So the main point is: separate durable workflow/data moats from generic SaaS, then lean into the former while sentiment is this bad.

Each SaaS has a different battle ahead of them.  You capture what I see for CRM well, thanks to the anecdote.
It might be an exercise worth taking to break down each SaaS moat and find ones that have a solid one.  Even stuff like tax prep software is less a moat than people realize, in theory the ability to switch providers is just a matter of control over your tax data.  Race to the bottom.

Amzn, AMD, ELF I think are going to have really good growth over next couple years. CRM & Microsoft I would buy the dip (if you can afford Microsoft stock prices that is).
MU has climbed so high, so fast that I could see it going to 500, but I don't think it has staying power near that figure and the stock price has skyrocketed so fast already.

That’s just not true. ADBE has been quiet on both fronts. CRM has a lot of routine sales. Insider moves are not also the be-all end-all of price direction.

Why tf would you build your own in house CRM??

agree to disagree.

I don't believe the moat of SaaS like ADBE or CRM comes from how hard their software is to replicate, but its how specialized and entrenched they are in that area of customer need.
Take ADBE's photoshop for example. We know digital medial consumption is on the rise, and AI is getting better and better at generating media. But if you were a direct to consumer media company, COULD you cancel your enterprise ADBE subscription and just rely on generic AI tools to product reliable production grade content consistently?
I think the answer is no.
Even if each worker is 10x more productive, and 90% of the work is done by AI. You still need photoshop for the finished product. And ADBE, being the dominant industry player, knows what customers want, and will likely improve their own software / AI tools to meet those needs. This isn't something generic AI like Gemini or SORA can do or compete with. So you are still stuck with ADBE.
Say you want to build an in-house product to replace photoshop. You put it into chatgpt and it spits out an exact product. This might be okay if you are a small company with very specific needs. But good luck in a larger corporation where you don't even know what the other departments do.
Then comes the issue of keeping up with top of the line SaaS. If ADBE photoshop release a new feature that will give competitors an edge over you, you're gonna have to keep up with that. Soon enough, you're going to need a team of engineers to keep your in-house product up to snuff, a team to test the new features to make sure they work as intended, and a team that answers questions and troubleshoots problems cause users are stupid. That defeats the whole point of getting rid of ADBE in the first place doesn't it? Instead of a subscription fee, your paying whole team of engineers.
The value of SaaS comes from allowing companies to outsource very technical software development to a team of industry experts. And never having to worry that they are falling behind industry standards.
I think that value proposition is huge. But I do believe the current head count based subscription pricing model, might come to an end. In reality, head count was a good approximation for customer size currently. But just like how software companies moved away from outright ownership model, they can definitely come up with new pricing models to better capture value when customer size isn't correlated with headcount.

Ahh honestly I think Adobe and others are pretty fairly valued based on what we know today.  CRM maybe a bit overvalued.  
Shorting Oracle at 300 was brilliant.  I wish I had the guts, it was the news on blue owl not wanting to finance their debt that triggered the fall

CRM and service center.

I hate CRM at my job, therefore puts

do you think CRM will climb back up soon

The main point: AI hurts bloated, undifferentiated SaaS economics long before it topples the logos themselves.
You’re right that CRM/ADBE/SNOW are entrenched and can bolt on AI. The risk isn’t “some rando vibes a better CRM in a weekend” – it’s:
1) Scope compression: AI lets customers do the same work with fewer seats, fewer adjacent tools, and more in-house glue. Over 5–10 years, that squeezes net expansion and weakens “must-have” status.
2) Modularization: AI + good APIs makes it easier to replace narrow slices of a suite (reporting, workflow, analytics) with best-of-breed pieces. You don’t rip out Salesforce, you gradually shrink its footprint.
3) Margin pressure: if everyone has strong AI assistants, the perceived gap between “premium” and “good enough” narrows. That caps pricing power, even if AI adds features.
Slackbot is a good example: powerful, but also a wedge for competitors to say “we do 80% of that for less.” I’ve seen teams use Notion AI, Linear, and Pulse for Reddit in combo to sidestep bigger suites for specific jobs (docs, issue tracking, demand gen). Incumbents survive, but their economic moats get thinner.

But isn’t the whole seats based subscription model being questioned for SaaS businesses with the basis that agents would be doing the work not humans. Hence the top SaaS firms like CRM and NOW have taken a beating.

Aye, CRM has a much better moat, but still priced at a premium considering their Agentforce shit show and tepid earnings growth the last couple years.

ADOBE,CRM,UBER,PGY,TTD.

Let me ask you a question: if a guy knocked on your door and showed you a car he'd just built, would you buy it? After you took a drive around the block? Would you buy it?
Do you think a customer service company running Salesforce is going to stop using that and take a risk on Heavy\_Discussion's vibe coded CRM, potentially destroying the customer base that is worth $50m? Does your vibe coded tool accurately import Salesforce data? Run all the processes as reliably as Salesforce?
And the sort of software you are talking about works because the development cost per user is tiny. 30 million people use Photoshop. Whatever they spend is divided by 30 million. So, it's absolutely worthwhile throwing good money at that, optimising it for performance. If you're building something for a few hundred users then sure, vibe coding might add up.
Regarding Oracle. Something you should understand about Oracle, is that their engine is rather poor value. You can do the same things on Postgres and SQL Server for a lower price. So why does Oracle still sell OracleDB licenses? Because people don't want to risk their millions of dollars of data. Kinda mad, but that's how it is. I know companies that put no new data on Oracle, but they aren't moving what is there.

I'm still a bit confused as to the argument of why it makes sense that major SaaS companies (e.g., CRM, ADBE, SNOW) will be disrupted by AI. I feel like realistically, these companies are so entrenched in the major enterprises and they own so much data, that it's much easier for them to add in AI functionality powered by LLM and train it using their proprietary data, than for any random AI startup to steal market share from them, or companies to vibe code their way to their own CRM.
One example would be Slack (Salesforce) that recently just launched Slackbot. It's an AI agent powered by Anthropic using all of the conversational and enterprise context to be your assistant, seems like a really powerful use case of AI.
Sure maybe AI will reduce the # of seats, but if AI is able to drive higher ROI, then these SaaS companies can also just charge a higher price. And if AI somehow doesn't pan out as well as people think, then they just go back to their old ways of working

Are you really putting Salesforce and Adobe in the same bucket and Microsoft and Google? They are very different companies.
I’ve been bearish on both since AI has been mainstream. Why do I need to use Adobe when I can just have Gemini do exactly what I planned on doing without even needing to open an application?
Why would I use Salesforce when I can use a open source alternative like Odoo. Heck in today’s day and age I can just create my own CRM that is custom and does exactly what I need and not have to deal with all the bloat and cost of Salesforce.
Adobe and Salesforce are not in the same realm of Microsoft and Google, and tbh I would not be surprised if both are no longer around in 10-15 years.
Just my humble opinion though.

I always thought $CRM is a glorified phonebook.