Germany Is a Nation of Grumblers says SAP Co-Founder Hasso Plattner.
Maybe they wouldn’t be if SAP’s software wasn’t so awful.
There’s a weird contradiction going on in this interview, because Plattner clearly doesn’t think a lot of the German HQ of his own company and much of what he has to say makes sense, but doesn’t seem to be part of SAP’s culture at all:
When Steve Jobs had already geared everything to large flat monitors, here at SAP they still had instructions to develop everything for a 1,024 by 768-pixel screen size. At the time, you couldn’t even buy such monitors any more in Palo Alto.
People would often rather put together a 50-page PowerPoint presentation than simply say: We want this and this! Three sentences is usually all it takes. The Germans need to learn that you sometimes have to play around with ideas.
Bah humbug!