SAP serenely promises to be less bad

My favorite saying about SAP:

"If SAP was the answer, what in god's name was the question?"

"What big, expensive thing can I buy to make myself feel important?"

A long time ago, the question often was:

"What system can we buy to replace our greenscreen in-house financial / manufacturing / sales system, that gives us multi-language, multi-currency, a GUI, an RDBMS, and freedom to choose hardware/OS/DB vendors?"

There was only one answer back then.

I remember this one from a /. discussion: "SAP is how Lucifer interacts with our world."

I spent a year+ working in corporate finance after college at a Fortune 500 company, and at the entry-level, this involved quite a bit of cost accounting/balance sheet work so I became quite familiar with SAP and its intricacies.

In my experience: SAP is painfully slow, incredibly non-intuitive, and the server inevitably crashes during every month-end close or year-end close with high usage.. so company wide everyone could be locked out of SAP for hours during the most critical times.

In other news, SAP promises to enter a faster horse into this year's Daytona 500.