Steven Sinofsky
speaker
5,951 appearances
15 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 3d ago
Steven Sinofsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And so like if you take SAP out of a large automobile manufacturer, there's no automobile manufacturer left or landmark.
Like the company just evaporates.
Because the company is defined not just by purchasing the software, not even by just using it, but by how they codified the business rules into that product.
It's just so important because this is one of the things where startups look at enterprise software and they think about it in terms of startup scale.
And so they take something mundane like expense reporting and like, okay, well, we have 40 people and one person can figure out expense reports for 40 people.
Like you could hire a human and be done with it.
Like literally come back from a trip, you dump the receipts in a bucket and one human rifles through them and the expense reporting problem goes away.
Or you say, oh, forget the human.
We'll just all take pictures of our receipts and OCR it and categorize it and the whole thing will go away.
And that's fine until you have 100,000 people in 20 countries with different national laws and policies about business expense and all of this.
And then you overlay corporate policies and the whole thing just, and then your business is just codified that way.
And you can't replace it.
Back in the late 1990s, who now is sort of the godfather of enterprise software, Larry Ellison at Oracle, back then they were only a database company and entering the world of NetSuite and ERP and all this.
But he went on a rant, a multi-year rant, about how enterprise software was so stupid because everybody customized it.
And he had this saying that just said,
businesses should just stick with the 80% solution and they should just use whatever works like 80% of the time.
And most enterprise people were like, well, A, you're just talking your book because your software only does 80% of what I need.
But B, like that's just not how it works.
Like if you take the auto industry and you just take the top 10 companies in autos,
They all, you know, putting aside EV versus gas or whatever, they all just make cars, which is a lot of known technology with assembly lines and workers.
Showing 1661–1680 of 5,951 · page 84 of 298
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