I tend to agree with anigbrowl. While there are some overlapping products, those things are a tiny fraction of what SAP sells and far from their core business (I used to work for SAP Business Objects.)
If looked at closely enough, no two businesses are alike. The question is, what's relevant to the discussion? In the scope of comparing consumer products vs business consulting, we can paint with broad enough strokes to call SAP and Autonomy "similar" businesses.
Perhaps so, but in this case you don't have to look too closely.
Autonomy & SAP have similar customers, true. But the suggestion in Gruber's post is that the purchase of Autonomy is a substitute for a purchase of SAP. Which is a bit like saying the purchase of a front drivers side door mirror is a substitute for the purchase of a car.
I'm stating this earnestly to try and explain why I think you're receiving a negative reaction. You'll chose how to take it. I sincerely mean no offense by it.
You're being downvoted because you are arguing a point that no one is making.
No one is saying that SAP and Autonomy are in the same business.
It's almost like you're choosing not to get it, just so you can talk about the differences between SAP and Autonomy.
This is, more or less, the thesis of Gruber's post:
> The thing is, Apotheker’s relevant experience was serving as CEO of SAP. What’s SAP? SAP is an enterprise software and consulting company. Honestly, we all should have seen this coming. You don’t bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn around a PC and device maker. You bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn a PC and device maker into an enterprise consulting company.
The only portion of the post where Gruber makes even a remotely questionable comparison is this statement:
> Autonomy — a company I’d never heard of before but which more or less sounds like a rival to SAP
He off-handedly likens Autonomy to SAP. Maybe that's wrong, but it doesn't matter.
Follow us all here:
Fact: HP was a hardware products company.
Fact: Apotheker was head of SAP, an "enterprise consulting" company.
Inference: Apotheker is going to take HP in an "enterprise consulting" direction, not a "hardware products" direction.
Arguing whether Autonomy and SAP are the same business is tangential to the point.
I don't have downvoting capability, otherwise I'd downvote you for condescension.
Gruber's a great writer for the most part, but this particular instance of his work is pretty trite and hardly a unique observation. His lack of knowledge about the players in the space should give a clue to readers about how much weight to give the rest of his insights about this subject.
Don't know why you are being downvoted - I'm mystified as to why people think there would be much overlap between what SAP does and what Autonomy does.
They are both enterprise software companies. It looks like Autonomy focuses on data analysis while SAP focuses on business development. Regardless, Autonomy is much much much more like SAP than it is like a consumer electronics company. The point is a good one.
For the purpose of the comparison (to show that Autonomy is far from the consumer market and close to the enterprise market) I would say they're close enough. Enterprise search and knowledge management applications are no less far from the consumer space than SAP.
