[eftpotrm]

I once worked on a project that only existed because the end users had seen the SAP web UI and rebelled, hard. In fairness I don't blame them; when we dug down it was easily the worst HTML I've ever seen and some impressively weird behaviour. I can't quite imagine which team at SAP thought it was appropriate to release as a tool.

So, we spent 6 months or so building a front-end that the users wouldn't refuse to touch. HTML5, responsive, attractive, flexible. I mostly worked on the toolkit side of the project to try and keep UIs vaguely standard across the multitude of screens.

And alongside us, the two highest paid contractors I've ever worked with (who seemed to be earning their money), were building what amounted to SQL stored procedures that went into a tool that let them be interfaced as REST APIs. The article talks about the amount to which businesses have to mash themselves around how SAP works - from what I saw and heard, that was even after they'd spent more customising SAP than I would expect to bill to have built very large parts of it from scratch.

So yes. I'm sure that, at a really large corporate scale, SAP has its advantages to organisations. But in a 20 year career it's probably my least favourite technology, including the email server which you could misconfigure so receiving an email would bring down the whole machine. I wouldn't be remotely surprised to see SAP disrupted into oblivion, and a bit of me would love to be part of the disruption.