I Hate SAP (my most clever title to date)

Disclaimer: This starts off really slow and highlights just how big of a nerd I can be. A whole post about software...where in the hell is my pocket protector.

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I read an article the other day about ERP software. The most interesting point in it was that the major ERP companies (think SAP) spend a majority of their revenues on advertising and trying to convince big business that their products are THE products to have.

To me this seems like it would lead to some serious problems. First off, if all of this money is being spent on advertising, what is being used to hire programmers to continually improve the software? Seems to me that this just leads to a very mediocre product that will quickly fall out of date. This in turn leads to the problem of acquiring and maintaining customers.

With a mediocre product, how do you get customers to buy it? I know! Spend more money on advertising. Spend oodles of $$$$ to convince all of the bonehead executives at major companies that your product is the one that they absolutely have to have. Make sure to use lots of little flashy, sparkly things to distract the executives from the lower cost alternatives that work way better but are not included in their list of executive buzzwords (again think SAP). That way, your customers employees (think me) can spend 5 x longer when trying to get anything done using your poorly thought out product.

Customer testimonial: Hi! My name is jpr and I #$%&$% LOVE SAP. Before when I did expense reports, I could get a months worth done in an hour. Now, with SAP, when I do expense reports I have to click on 5x as many buttons to do the exact same freaking thing. This keeps me from having to do any real work. Plus, when it is time to look the expense report over for mistakes, SAP puts it in a nice user-notfriendly format so that I can just say screw it and send it in as is. I LOVE SAP!

I would write more but I am still doing expense reports.