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Comment by kneebonian | Hacker News Reader

> But originally the App Store was leveraging their existing payment infrastructure e.g. the one they use for iPhone sales. Purchases and invoices were done through SAP which was manually configured to support those price points.

Can I just say finding out that Apple uses SAP on the backend is just one of those things that shakes my world view.

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From one of my internal contacts who worked there & had to actually interface with the SAP implementation:

1) It's one of the largest SAP deployments in the US if not the world

2) SAP (at the time) was the only one who could offer an ERP that scaled to do what Apple wanted.

Homegrown enterprise software is one of those things that sounds great until you realize you're re-inventing a lot of code dealing with regulations (tax/hr legal) that is other companies bread & butter so it's worth "paying their price" rather than getting it wrong and being on the wrong side of litigation/legislation.

The only thing I’d rather work on less than SAP is rolling my own ERP system.

The guy who originally set up Apple’s SAP integration in the 80s(?) used to run Caffe Frascati, a popular café/music venue in downtown San Jose.

Amazon used Oracle until a few years ago, Google accounting teams used Excel, etc.

Do Google accountants use Sheets?

Excel? Small and medium companies probably can run on Excel but I'm sure no large company can run their finance entirely with Excel. Google switched from Oracle to SAP. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/05/google-will-stop-using-oracl...

I don't think that's been true for over a decade. Google has a pretty sophisticated internal payments system that handles terms customers, invoicing, payment initiation, and lots more.

I understand that Cloud specifically is switching to manage accounting using SAP, but most of Google runs via our own in-house systems.

Source: work at Google in payments. This is only my personal opinion.

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