Sunday, April 08, 2007
Thinksum: Political Turf
Thinksum: Political Turf: "So Shai Agassi left SAP ... I'm sure he was disappointed in Netweaver's lack of success. Sure SAP customers may want to use it, but relevance beyond that is nil. Why do application vendors ever think they're going to make their own proprietary stuff into a hugely successful platform (hint hint salesforce.com)? It's like when Microsoft thought it could take over programming languages with C#. Self-delusion.
One interesting thing about SAP is the culture clash between the German parent and the platform team in California. At my last company, about two years ago we entered into serious discussions with SAP about being acquired (we ended up being acquired by someone else). I participated in due diligence with folks from SAP Germany and also SAP in Palo Alto. It was clear to those of us who participated that there was an uncomfortable relationship between the groups. The Palo Alto people considered themselves smarter (I'm not sure they were), but the folks from Germany were clearly in charge. Every meeting was fraught with internal politics, all the SAP people being very careful about what they would say in front of others, and saying different things to us when we were alone in rooms.
I never met Shai Agassi, but from what I could tell he seemed more like a politician than a software person (which he kind of purported to be in leading the SAP platform vision). I'm not surprised that political involvement is part of his future plan."
One interesting thing about SAP is the culture clash between the German parent and the platform team in California. At my last company, about two years ago we entered into serious discussions with SAP about being acquired (we ended up being acquired by someone else). I participated in due diligence with folks from SAP Germany and also SAP in Palo Alto. It was clear to those of us who participated that there was an uncomfortable relationship between the groups. The Palo Alto people considered themselves smarter (I'm not sure they were), but the folks from Germany were clearly in charge. Every meeting was fraught with internal politics, all the SAP people being very careful about what they would say in front of others, and saying different things to us when we were alone in rooms.
I never met Shai Agassi, but from what I could tell he seemed more like a politician than a software person (which he kind of purported to be in leading the SAP platform vision). I'm not surprised that political involvement is part of his future plan."
