Software stocks got pummeled this week after a cluster of troubling earnings reports

Salesforce executives told investors that deals are shrinking or getting delayed. Dell said its margin is getting smaller. Okta highlighted macroeconomic challenges. And Veeva's CEO said on his company's earnings call that generative artificial intelligence has been "a competing priority" for customers.

Add it all up and it was a brutal week for software and enterprise tech.

Salesforce shares plunged almost 20% on Thursday, the biggest drop since 2004, after the cloud software vendor posted weaker-than-expected revenue and issued disappointing guidance. CEO Marc Benioff said Salesforce grew quickly in the Covid age as companies rushed to buy products for remote work. Then customers had to integrate all the new technology, and to eventually rationalize.

"Every enterprise software company kind of has adjusted" since after the pandemic, Benioff said on his company's earnings call. Businesses that have reported lately are "all basically saying that same thing in different ways."

Software makers MongoDB, SentinelOne, UiPath and Veeva all pulled down their full-year revenue forecasts this week.

The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, an exchange-traded fund that tracks cloud stocks, slid 5% this week, the sharpest decline since January. Paycom, GitLab, Confluent, Snowflake and ServiceNow all lost at least 10% of their value in the downdraft.

Dell, which sells PCs and data center hardware to businesses, bumped up its full-year forecast on Thursday and said its backlog for AI servers had grown to $3.8 billion from $2.9 billion three months ago. But the growing portion of these servers in the product mix, along with higher input costs, will cause the company's gross margin to narrow by 150 basis points for the year.

Dell shares slide 13%