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Comment by shrimpx | Hacker News Reader

It seems super strange to adopt the market leader’s processes. You’d think the spirit should be that you can outdo/outcompete then instead of adopting what they’re doing...

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Corporations running at the scale where SAP operates are so huge that basically nobody fully understands them or really know what they're doing (but they're also big and entrenched enough that they don't need to - inertia, institutional memory, brand awareness and existing product-market fit will do the job as long as the market doesn't radically shift from under their feet, cf. disruption). Seen through that lens it's no surprise that cargo culting is so widespread, or that huge businesses like SAP, Oracle and McKinsey can make massive profits off of essentially giving upper management in big corporations the reassurance that 'they are doing what everyone else is doing' so hopefully the good times will keep rolling.

Competitors cannot outsmart the leader in every facet of business. They creatively optimize some processes, but for the rest of the business their choices are wing it or purchase the Commercial Software solution.

Even a bleeding-edge company will hit an obstacle they cannot improvise through (like in QA or Compliance). That's when enterprise software creeps into an otherwise lean operation.

Think POs, procurement, payables, receivables, treasury and inventory management etc. Is following what Toyota does strange?

It makes getting bought by the market leader easier at least.

Yes, Its really super strange to adopt Google, Microsoft, Apple processes.. Yes?

This is like assuming that Microsoft or Google is successful because of the version control software they use, rather than because of the actual software they wrote. It may be a useful hint about good practices, but it's quite possible that it's not the best solution for you and it is certainly not THE way to be successful.

The other way to look at it is that if you truly believe your strength is your product (the software you write), you might as well not risk in other areas where you could either make a right or a wrong decision, and just standardize on every other process so you're on a level playing field. This way you lose the chance of innovating on how to do payroll more efficiently, but you focus your innovation efforts on your product (your software).

You mean like stack rating, the microservices crazy, massively parallel cluster for dealing with 1GB of data, letting an army of very competent developers to unproductive companies because all you care about is brain teasers, creating user-hostile interfaces because of "design", and other things like that?

If Google had tried hard to adopt Yahoo, it wouldn't have gone very well for them, I figure.

Apple did not use Microsofts processes to get where they are today. Neither did Google.

If you want to be better than them, then I'd say Yes.

The key is to figure out what to copy and what to innovate. This is usually captured by the idea of "core competency": figure out what your company's unique competency is, innovate in that area, and avoid trying to innovate in other areas in order to save time.

Actually yes. I saw numerous teams adopting monorepos, k8s, microservices and other buzzwords, and either suffering infinitely or putting enormous effort into dragging those to the point of sheer mediocrity. Because they are not Google and will never be.

Scale matters.

Unless your company has thousands of employees and billions in revenue, Google/Microsoft/Apple processes are probably not for you.

==Unless your company has thousands of employees and billions in revenue, Google/Microsoft/Apple processes are probably not for you.==

Then you probably don't need and shouldn't buy SAP.

Correct. Random companies cargo-culting what Google does has made half the industry massively dysfunctional e.g. in hiring processes

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