GOOG is now also an AI company, so not exactly a fair comp as it doesn't fit neatly into the "software" bucket

MSFT is only up 3% over the last year

Some 7-15% down in a trading day is a lot for an established corporation. I consider Salesforce dropping 7% without some obvious trigger to be at least somewhat newsworthy, and from the first sentences in the article I get the impression that The Economist is sitting on more examples like that.

A lot of people are tense about the AI venture ouroboros and what it might mean for future software, especially people with money and little to no experience actually deploying software.

Edit: At the time I saw some memes claiming that roughly 1.5 trillion dollars in market value had evaporated, which if true is not a small sum.

You didn't read the article. The first graph plots Workday, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow. Google isn't mentioned.