Lean years and language games

I am not a major shareholder in SAP. I am not an SAP partner where repair orders increase when SAP software quality drops. I am an existing SAP customer who tries to keep his IT team happy and convince his own management of certain necessities. I am a Formula 1 fan and Ferrarist. Because of the first two race weekends in September, my sporting capacity for suffering even exceeded SAP's licensing capacity for suffering.

On Spiegel Online, I then read a remarkable analysis of the ongoing Ferrari disaster. What is remarkable for me is the temporal offset of mistakes, failure and success. Applied to SAP, it could mean that the successes of a Bill McDermott originated with Professor Henning Kagermann. Regardless of how good our three musketeers are - Christian Klein, Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig - disaster is already lurking around the next corner.

The text on Spiegel Online sent a shiver down my spine, not only because I am a Ferrarist, but also because the text shows frightening parallels to SAP's history: Ferrari relies on Italian team bosses, which doesn't have to be fundamentally wrong. (Note: Christian, Klein, Jürgen Müller, Thomas Saueressig and CFO Luka Mucic are one hundred percent SAP creatures from the Walldorf area and from Potsdam, see HPI).

However, this kind of "Wagenburg" mentality can also lead to a lack of a neutral and less emotionally charged view of the overall construct. (Note: Who wouldn't describe Walldorf as a wagon train?) This also applies to the level below; new top technicians from outside have not been brought in over the past few years. (Note: I know of only two exceptions - Anuj Kapur came from Cisco and Sabine Bendiek from Microsoft.

Many top executives have left SAP; this list would go beyond the scope of this page). A point that ex-Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo also criticized on RTL. He said that good people had been let go, such as the current technical director of Mercedes. (Source: Spiegel Online, September 2020, "A momentous fraud")

SAP is like an ocean liner. Frantically turning the steering wheel hardly accomplishes anything. The outflow and inflow of knowledge will be staggered. The management change will still have to be evaluated - single top, double top, single top again and so on, from Kagermann to Apotheker, Snabe, McDermott, Morgan and Klein.

Meanwhile, SAP board members Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig seem to be tormented by quite different problems: SAP is planning to replace discriminatory technical terms in IT colloquial language, as can be read in the FAZ: no "slaves" and no "black lists".

Jürgen Müller wants to try to replace the IT term pair "master" and "slave," which he translates as "master" and "slave" according to the FAZ and apparently equates with the slavery of black field workers in the southern United States. All is well as long as Luka Mucic is "in the black," right?

Looking at the past two to three millennia of civilization, I cannot see that slaves were always "people of color." Thus this historical consciousness is to be questioned. Also I am of the opinion that between colloquial and technical language must be distinguished!

Master and slave in computer science characterize a dependency relationship in the form of data flow and control commands. The program code which is "slave" in a certain situation, because it receives data, can take over the master role for other subroutines in the next moment.

A colloquially correct evaluation for a cybernetic system will be difficult to realize. Master and slave are technical vocabulary from computer science and have no interpretative authority in everyday language.

To interpret it in the words of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 to 1951): Computer science is its own language game and political correctness is another language game. According to Wittgenstein, it is all about perspective on discourse! I wish Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig success.