
Does SAP – or Oracle – have product/market fit? - franciscomello
Marc Andreessen says:
&quot;You can always feel when product&#x2F;market fit isn&#x27;t happening. The customers aren&#x27;t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn&#x27;t spreading, usage isn&#x27;t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of &quot;blah&quot;, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.&quot;
Yet, if you survey 100 SAP - or Oracle - customers, 99 will behave exactly like that; they don&#x27;t even like the product; end-users hate them; there are no killer features; etc etc etc.<p>How can I solve this mental conundrum?
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argonaut
They sort of do, they sort of don't. And it doesn't matter at all. Product
market fit is a concept used to describe startups. Specifically, I take it to
mean when a startup has managed to engage/sell to a small, rapidly-expanding
group of very passionate users/customers. It doesn't apply to huge enterprise
companies at scale. Everybody has heard of Oracle. Nobody has heard of <foo>
startup.

Not everything can be analyzed with the same types of analysis. It is a
complete mistake to try to analyze startups like you analyze large companies,
and vice versa.

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GFischer
I think you're confusing users with customers. Most SAP users probably don't
like it or hate it, but the people buying or paying for it? (CEO's,
shareholders, etc).. they probably love it, and word of mouth does work - if
someone has a SAP-killer that people don't know about, I haven't heard of it.

ju-st said it best -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10617830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10617830)

Also, long sales cycles are normal in huge multimillion dollar B2B products.

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gladmind
well said GFischer, I agree with you

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MrTonyD
Stop believing the often BS personal opinions of "experts" like Andreessen or
Horowitz. Most customers hate the products that they buy - but they need them
to solve a problem and they have few choices. It is only in some markets where
there are "commodity" products to choose between and you can evaluate the
product in the way suggested by these guys.

Maybe the real point is that there are different types of markets with
different characteristics. And whenever you read some billionaires opinion you
really need to be skeptical - there is always some personal set of values and
experiences behind those opinions.

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argonaut
Marc Andreessen isn't suggesting Oracle doesn't have p/m fit, only the OP is.

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ju-st
I'm sure big companies love SAP. The killer feature is that it works. There is
no other comparable software. You will never run out of guys who can maintain
the system. The user interface is complicated by design; it's reusable and you
can check/see every value multiple times before it is finally saved (wrong
data leads to wasted time & wasted money); and finally it's easier for the
consultants to implement. And in my opinion the most important fact is that
the customers of SAP are top-level executives and so on and not the end-user.

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franciscomello
I've seen big global companies spend months without being able to bill and/or
collect money because of SAP problems. SAP is basically a cover a%$ for
terrible decision makers, i.e., a marketing play. No?

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tixocloud
SAP and Oracle are great at leveraging the network effects of having thousands
of businesses built on top of their product offering. Think of how many
consultants, books, courses and who knows what else that is based on SAP and
Oracle. It's also customizable to anything their customers want. There's a
huge amount of after-purchase support that ensures the buyer has some degree
of confidence.

