Larry Ellison's rant that enterprise software was ruined because everyone customized it, and that companies should settle for an '80% solution,' missed the point: companies like Ford, Toyota, and GM are effectively defined and run by their unique SAP customizations, not by the generic software itself.
Sinofsky recounts Larry Ellison's famous complaint that enterprise customers over-customize software, arguing instead that this customization is precisely what differentiates competitors like Ford, Toyota, and GM from one another. ✦ AI generated
Stephen Sinofsky · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-07 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 19:41
Larry Ellison at Oracle... went on a 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... 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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 19:41
19:41about business expense and all of those and then you overlay corporate policies and and the whole thing just and then your business is just codified that way and it and you can't replace it. You back in the um 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 Netswuite and
20:04ERP and all this but he went on a rant he 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
20:30need. But B, like that's 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 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. Like what differentiates the the companies and what differentiates them is how they operate and the
20:57internal processes to decide what car to make, how many more materials to buy, what currencies to hedge, how many people to hire, when to introduce a new product line. All of that is enterprise resource management and planning. And how is all of that done? It's all in SAP. So those companies are effectively run by people sitting in conference rooms looking at SAP screens and and the difference between
21:27Ford and Toyota and General Motors and Daimler are just are not just that they're looking at the same screen. it's that they chose which screens to look at, which customizations to make in those screens, and then they go and they buy steel and aluminum and wire and dashboards and radios from all the same places. And so it's a I I just think that people wildly underestimate the the level of house of sophistication