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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Good that he works now for SAP. The software needs a new UI.

The SAP ERP software UI dates back to the 80s, and is still basically all text based, even the tables are still made out of ASCII chars.

Screenshot of an text based table (SAP ERP): https://mysapbasis.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/screenshot1.j... ... the table borders are drawn over the all text (= a lot of space and tab chars) based table.

Textfields cannot be longer than 40 chars, multiline textfields don't exist (basically one textfield per line) and it looks like a dinosaur UI in 2015 - optimized for 14" CRT monitors. Their HTML4 Netweaver UI and Java "experiments" failed.

The ABAP script language dates back to the 80s too and looks like COBOL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP

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I was under the impression he works indirectly for SAP via this company that SAP funded (search for similar situation with Vi Hart and/or Alan Kay).

Can't argue the old SAP ERP looks outdated (but ... somehow it works :)).

Recently SAP released a new product called Cloud for Analytics, here's some of the screenshot:

http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-plan.png

http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-discover.pn...

http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-visualize.p...

http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-predict.png

There are still plenty rooms to improve ...

PS: I'm part of the Cloud for Analytics team.

(disclaimer: I'm a 23 yr old IT dude) See it's interesting, I would rather use the old UI over what you show here, it could be I'm not really seeing everything, but it looks like all you did was update the graphics and add more white space without adding any real UX improvements, I shudder thinking about trying to explain this "improvement" to whichever dept (finance? marketing? analytics?) this software is meant for. The one thing all my colleagues hate is not being able to see all the data (well really, not being able to see as much data as possible) give 'em cramped boxes over huge whitewashed screens any day of the week.

I worked on the table for a different SAP product (Lumira) and I think ours works pretty well. It's for business analysts and lets you stack hierarchies in a bunch of different ways. For a large overview of data, it's better to use a different visualization anyways which was a click away in Lumira.

http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-127432-7...

Ugh, this almost deserves an NSFW tag. Just thinking about the pile of legacy code that must sitting behind this horror gives me nausea.

Weirdly enough, this goes even to the database:

- I've seen my fair share of columns typed as fixed-width NCHAR. Yeah, a "89.99" order total you see on the screen might be stored internally as `000000000089.99`.

- Booleans? Why not use `x`, ` ` and `#` instead of true, false and null?

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