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What Might Have Been: Microsoft Almost Bought SAP
steveorama writes "This article from Bloomberg indicates that 'Microsoft Corp, the world's largest software maker, approached late last year about buying the German company, a combination that would have vaulted it to the biggest seller of software for business applications.'" The talks came out in advance of likely disclosure in the ongoing merger battle involving Oracle, PeopleSoft and the U.S. Department of Justice. An anonymous reader points to this article in the Financial Times, adding "Microsoft says the discussions were halted due to the complexity involved in the transaction and in integrating the two companies. A merger with SAP would be a profound break with previous Microsoft strategy, and would likely have raised eyebrows among regulators."
SAP has about the worst User Interface I've ever seen. The only exception might be old IBM terminals running on mainframes.
For all the negative we say about microsoft, they have done a lot for generating a consistant user interface. On SAP, sometimes you have to hit enter, sometimes you click the green checkmark (in "random" locations), sometimes you click the clock icon, sometimes you hit f8.
Unless you use it every day, you forget how to use the basic functions.
You forget how nice it is to use Windows until you use SAP!
German antitrust law would not apply. A MS/SAP merger would be subject to the European merger regulations.
My experience is that the big ERP systems are pretty bloated. One of the things that went on with these systems was that every company had to have a whole set of "modifications" to make the ERP system fit their business. These mods were often poorly done, poorly controlled and caused no end of reliability problems. These mods often contributed to the implementation projects being way over budget and way late. These mods, that almost all of their customers did, became a major obstacle to installing new versions. One of my past employers had a highly modified ERP system that they wanted to upgrade from 2.x to 3.y. They spent serverl hundred thousand dollars implementing the mods on version 3.y and finally just gave up because it was too hard. (I wasn't on that project!) They kept using 2.x until they were acquired by a competitor (who was actually using something older, more modified, and worse).
The ERP systems companies started making their software more "customizable" or "configurable" in an attempt to prevent mods. This made these already very large programs into true behemoths. A lot of companies still want their mods and that still causes a lot of cost and grief.
There are some systems that are not bloated--these are often called mid-range or tier 2 systems. One that I have used is Fourth Shift. It is not a perfect system, but it is low bloat and can be implemented pretty quickly and reasonably painlessly. I've installed FS into 4 businesses and each of those projects went very well. Some of these suppliers of smaller systems don't allow mods by the simple expedient of not distributing source code.