4 ms·

Well put. Who in HP's board made the brilliant decision of bringing in Mr ex-SAP as the HP CEO. 1. The dude has no experience running a consumer oriented hardw

by deepGem 15y ago

Well put. Who in HP's board made the brilliant decision of bringing in Mr ex-SAP as the HP CEO. 1. The dude has no experience running a consumer oriented hardware business. 2. He hasn't run a global company. (SAP, for all it's glory is still an European company). 3. None of SAP's businesses have anything in common with HP's DNA. Not sure why the board committed such a blunder and why they continue to do so as the CEO is taking down one of the well respected companies in the valley.

archangel_one 15y ago
Disagree on point 2; we see some of SAP's tentacles down here in New Zealand which is about as far from Europe as it's possible to get. Wikipedia seems to think they're pretty global too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG). Having said that, I don't think it would be the biggest issue anyway; 1 and 3 are much bigger problems for HP and you're spot-on with those.
- dangrossman 15y ago
  SAP's US headquarters is near me in Pennsylvania. I interviewed for a software developer job there once. I was told, by the interviewer, that the programming jobs in the US are boring because the real work is done in Germany...
  - samt 15y ago
    The PA office is a bit of a glorified regional sales office. SAP Labs in Palo Alto however does a lot of interesting and original dev work. There are quite a few very good engineers there who would take real offense at this statement.
  - mahmud 15y ago
    Non-boring SAP job?
    - flopflopflop 15y ago
      From a pure techie point of view you can do great stuff there as a programmer. But the end-result is just nog as sexy as having developed games for an iphone or invented the New Social Thing. But your software scales over 100 gigs of RAM, is blazingly fast and can process transaction records in the order of 10,000s per second; that's non-boring to me :P
      - hessenwolf 15y ago
        Yes... but I think quite many of us older than 23 would rather program SAP than games or Iphone apps, although I wouldn't hazard a guess at the proportion.
    - mrich 15y ago
      C++ developer working at SAP here, so my job is not exactly representative of SAP. That said, it is a very interesting job. We are building a distributed in-memory database that can power lots of SAP applications. We work with server machines with 2TB of RAM, gigantic SSD storage and many, many cores. You also get to work with application developers who have built the things that run at the core of the major companies in the world, and many of them have decades of experience at this. These applications will likely never be put in the cloud or replaced by something with just a nicer GUI, since the important thing is security, correctness and absolute stability. So do not rule out companies which seem to do "just boring" stuff when looking for your next job. Enterprise applications can be very challenging (and are also reliable money makers).
  - ugh 15y ago
    I bet that working in the German Apple headquarter is also extremely boring – that doesn’t mean Apple is not an international company.
  - flopflopflop 15y ago
    Not true. SAP tends to acquire a lot of new companies (with the fight with Oracle heating up in the past couple of years) and a lot of these smaller companies are based around the globe. The core of some of these applications are not even developed in Waldorf but f.e. in Palo Alto or Seoul; so that interviewer doesn't know what he's talking about.
- _andreb 15y ago
  My brother-in-law runs is MD of the SAP office in Kazakhstan, seems pretty global to me too.
- deepGem 15y ago
  I should have been more specific. When I say a global company, I mean that every aspect about the company should be global. Having an office in every part of the world doesn't make the company a global company if almost all of the leadership decisions stem out of Germany.
tsotha 15y ago
I used to work for a logistics company, and about half of our customers (all major US companies) required us to integrate with their SAP system. SAP may do most of its business in Europe, but it certainly does have an international customer base.
- smiler 15y ago
  Plus most companies which actually use SAP have worldwide operations. SAP is definitely a global company in terms of customer base.
moonlighter 15y ago
Leo Apotheker basically got FIRED by SAP. http://www.economist.com/node/15501649 http://www.economist.com/node/15501649
flopflopflop 15y ago
You're widly misinformed when it comes to SAP (edit: reacting to point #2, I agree with the other two.) For specific SAP projects I worked on they had development offices in Tel Seoul, Beijing, Berlin and Waldorf. Another project had development offices in Tel Aviv, Palo Alto and Waldorf. And this goes on and on. It's areally international company, more development spreadout than with Microsoft f.e. Their customers range from Pepsi and Coca Cola. Also, do you know what runs at the backend Apple itunes? What do you think makes Philips' distribution channels tick? SAP always claims that of all the goods being manufactured, shipped and sold across the world passes through an SAP system. That said; SAP is primary a support and consultancy organizaqtion. They spend a shitton of money on R&D and new software development but the last time I read their year report they gained most of their revenue from the very expensive support contracts they sell (but as a big bank who cannot afford downtime they will then guarantee you to have an expert on site within 2 hours yaddayaddayadda) What that SAP dude is doing at HP is beyond me.
dataloss 15y ago
"Search Committee of the Board of Directors has been created, consisting of Marc L. Andreessen, Lawrence T. Babbio, Jr., John H. Hammergren, and Joel Z. Hyatt, which will oversee the process for the identification and selection of a new CEO and Board Chair." http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/hp-ceo-mark-hurd-resigns/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/hp-ceo-mark-hurd-resigns/

by deepGem 15y ago

archangel_one 15y ago

Disagree on point 2; we see some of SAP's tentacles down here in New Zealand which is about as far from Europe as it's possible to get. Wikipedia seems to think they're pretty global too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG). Having said that, I don't think it would be the biggest issue anyway; 1 and 3 are much bigger problems for HP and you're spot-on with those.

dangrossman 15y ago
SAP's US headquarters is near me in Pennsylvania. I interviewed for a software developer job there once. I was told, by the interviewer, that the programming jobs in the US are boring because the real work is done in Germany...
- samt 15y ago
  The PA office is a bit of a glorified regional sales office. SAP Labs in Palo Alto however does a lot of interesting and original dev work. There are quite a few very good engineers there who would take real offense at this statement.
- mahmud 15y ago
  Non-boring SAP job?
  - flopflopflop 15y ago
    From a pure techie point of view you can do great stuff there as a programmer. But the end-result is just nog as sexy as having developed games for an iphone or invented the New Social Thing. But your software scales over 100 gigs of RAM, is blazingly fast and can process transaction records in the order of 10,000s per second; that's non-boring to me :P
    - hessenwolf 15y ago
      Yes... but I think quite many of us older than 23 would rather program SAP than games or Iphone apps, although I wouldn't hazard a guess at the proportion.
  - mrich 15y ago
    C++ developer working at SAP here, so my job is not exactly representative of SAP. That said, it is a very interesting job. We are building a distributed in-memory database that can power lots of SAP applications. We work with server machines with 2TB of RAM, gigantic SSD storage and many, many cores. You also get to work with application developers who have built the things that run at the core of the major companies in the world, and many of them have decades of experience at this. These applications will likely never be put in the cloud or replaced by something with just a nicer GUI, since the important thing is security, correctness and absolute stability. So do not rule out companies which seem to do "just boring" stuff when looking for your next job. Enterprise applications can be very challenging (and are also reliable money makers).
- ugh 15y ago
  I bet that working in the German Apple headquarter is also extremely boring – that doesn’t mean Apple is not an international company.
- flopflopflop 15y ago
  Not true. SAP tends to acquire a lot of new companies (with the fight with Oracle heating up in the past couple of years) and a lot of these smaller companies are based around the globe. The core of some of these applications are not even developed in Waldorf but f.e. in Palo Alto or Seoul; so that interviewer doesn't know what he's talking about.
_andreb 15y ago
My brother-in-law runs is MD of the SAP office in Kazakhstan, seems pretty global to me too.
deepGem 15y ago
I should have been more specific. When I say a global company, I mean that every aspect about the company should be global. Having an office in every part of the world doesn't make the company a global company if almost all of the leadership decisions stem out of Germany.

tsotha 15y ago

I used to work for a logistics company, and about half of our customers (all major US companies) required us to integrate with their SAP system. SAP may do most of its business in Europe, but it certainly does have an international customer base.

smiler 15y ago
Plus most companies which actually use SAP have worldwide operations. SAP is definitely a global company in terms of customer base.

moonlighter 15y ago

Leo Apotheker basically got FIRED by SAP. http://www.economist.com/node/15501649 http://www.economist.com/node/15501649

flopflopflop 15y ago

You're widly misinformed when it comes to SAP (edit: reacting to point #2, I agree with the other two.) For specific SAP projects I worked on they had development offices in Tel Seoul, Beijing, Berlin and Waldorf. Another project had development offices in Tel Aviv, Palo Alto and Waldorf. And this goes on and on. It's areally international company, more development spreadout than with Microsoft f.e. Their customers range from Pepsi and Coca Cola. Also, do you know what runs at the backend Apple itunes? What do you think makes Philips' distribution channels tick? SAP always claims that of all the goods being manufactured, shipped and sold across the world passes through an SAP system. That said; SAP is primary a support and consultancy organizaqtion. They spend a shitton of money on R&D and new software development but the last time I read their year report they gained most of their revenue from the very expensive support contracts they sell (but as a big bank who cannot afford downtime they will then guarantee you to have an expert on site within 2 hours yaddayaddayadda) What that SAP dude is doing at HP is beyond me.

dataloss 15y ago

"Search Committee of the Board of Directors has been created, consisting of Marc L. Andreessen, Lawrence T. Babbio, Jr., John H. Hammergren, and Joel Z. Hyatt, which will oversee the process for the identification and selection of a new CEO and Board Chair." http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/hp-ceo-mark-hurd-resigns/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/hp-ceo-mark-hurd-resigns/