Mike Vernal: The software industry in the AI era will become barbell-shaped, with the middle layer disappearing

Investor Mike Vernal stated on X that the software industry may repeat the barbell phenomenon seen in the newspaper industry of the 1990s. After the internet brought distribution costs to zero, The New York Times' subscriptions increased from a print circulation of 1.113 million in 2002 to about 13.4 million, while the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Dallas Morning News saw declines of 73% to 91%, with the middle tier disappearing.

Vernal believes that AI is driving the costs of copying, migrating, and integrating software close to zero, eroding traditional moats, and reducing the importance of switching costs and network effects, while economies of scale and branding are rising. In the future, each procurement center for enterprise software will have one AI-native system, small and medium-sized enterprises will lean towards integrated systems, and medium-sized point solutions may be consolidated or disappear. He suggests that venture capital-supported software companies "go all in," with the moat being the extreme replication cost of building massive software daily and reinvesting. At the same time, a large number of small software solutions may emerge, similar to the Shopify ecosystem of the D2C era.