What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
I worked in public accounting with some major corporations as clients. Every single company I interacted with used SAP. It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched. Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. We would conduct walkthroughs with process control owners that showed us what they would do in SAP to perform their job functions, and it would take multiple, intelligent people to capture all of the processes. The knowledge that the users at the client had built up was extensive and highly specialized. If something happened to that person, I don’t think you could quickly plug in a new person and have them take over. The initial learning curve felt far too high. I’m sure it gave those people a sense of job security.<p>I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. SAP feels like one of those businesses that’s too big to fail because it’s so entrenched in the corporate world. Somewhat jokingly, I think it would be easier to switch the US over to the metric system. Any challenger will have to be massive, accept losses for over a decade to gain market share, and have incredible support for their clients if they ever want to takeover in the Fortune 500 world. Challenges too great for a mere startup to accomplish.<p>It’s easier to just hire people to learn the SAP workflow and then hire external auditors to make sure the accounting policies are properly being followed.