House message: The longest chocolate in the world

There is a TV commercial that fascinates me: In a crowded subway car, all passengers are busy with their smartphones - no one has eye contact with their neighbor.

Only two young people, a woman and a man, look at each other sheepishly - obviously they don't own a smartphone or there's no reason for them to use one even while driving.

They walk toward each other when suddenly the man grabs his chest and pretends his smartphone is vibrating. The woman looks sheepishly to the side.

From his breast pocket, the man takes out an elongated Duplo chocolate bar, briefly hints at a phone call, and then hands the bar to the woman with the words "For you". Happy ending!

Whether this commercial represents real life I don't know, and to what extent the intense preoccupation with smartphones prevents interpersonal contact is a matter for others to investigate.

I see that the focus on and fascination with technology can blind you to the beautiful and important things in life. Ultimately, everyone has to find their own way through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter on smartphones, tablets and notebooks.

It is also understandable and tolerable that a certain fascination emanates from technology. But the absolutely meaningless image manipulations of a Snapchat app on a smartphone are highly sophisticated algorithms that would do credit to any mathematician or computer scientist. So it is always necessary to consider several sides.

SAP is also more fascinated than ever by technology, mathematics and algorithms. It all started with "real-time" Hana. At this year's DSAG Technology Days, SAP CIO Thomas Saueressig gave a largely meaningless demonstration using virtual glasses and augmented reality.

While he looked from the stage into the audience, an avatar was displayed that performed certain office functions and transmitted messages. The demonstration required a great deal of technical effort. The added value was not clear to me.

The idea that SAP users will be using AR glasses to do their work in the future is frightening. We can only hope that a remnant of users and partners without glasses will still have an eye for real life - like the couple from the TV commercial mentioned above.

The danger is that the technology becomes an end in itself. The in-memory computing database calculates very quickly - but for what purpose? The Austrian Federal Computing Center (BRZ) is currently investigating what added value Hana can bring in addition to the speed advantage.

If everything is ready thirty minutes earlier with Hana, what are the BRZ officials supposed to do with the "won" time? It is to be feared that technology will fascinate and topics such as business administration and organization, with which SAP has become big and the world market leader, will be neglected.

With standard business software, SAP can claim a unique selling proposition - with technology such as augmented reality, machine learning, cloud computing or Hana, it is merely one among many.