So, same reason why Microsoft uses SAP instead of Microsoft Dynamics. They would use their own product if they were to start now, but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time.
Just personally, I value companies who "dogfood" their products a lot more than similar companies that don't.
An example is 3D printers. Prusa makes fantastic 3D printers, and about half of the structural parts for their printers are printed on their own printers. So they have 600 of their own 3D printers printing 24/7 printing their own parts. That means they are forced to address long-term durability and reliability issues even just to ship their own product.
Because it absolutely is true that at that scale, you're usually better off just injection molding the parts, but they'd lose the high-quality signaling that yeah, their 3D printers are good enough for the company to rely on them to print their product. They also lose out on insight to things they could do to improve their own product from a usability standpoint.
I shuddered a bit when i heard that some GCP services are just external wrappers over internal systems. Feels like a bad setup for everyone involved: customers, wrapper owners and internal system owners.
Was mentioned in an onsite interview i had with them a few years back. Maybe i misunderstood but it seemed that internal teams didn't integrate with the same API as external customers. Not sure the other reply means that the "wrapper" doesn't exist or the wrapper's are just named the same as the underlying service or i just misunderstood the point.
My impression (I work at Google) is that internal interfaces to some of these services have a lot of Google-specific stuff that are hard to map to non-Google requirements.
> but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time.
Microsoft's annual revenue is almost US$200 billion. Even if the migration would "cost them millions", they can easily afford it, it would not make any material difference to their ultimate financial position. And, it would actually be justifiable as an investment in their own ERP suite – "eating their own dogfood" would send a signal to their customers about their commitment to those products, and would also help improve those products over time (by exposing them to the distinctive needs of a Microsoft-scale enterprise). As far as time goes, they could always do it gradually (maybe they already are), and even if it takes several years, before we know it those years will be behind us.
I don't think people should be down voting you for this comment, but I imagine the reason why is because that's generally not how things work at large companies. Someone in product and/or sales might have made the same argument you have, but in my experience the business response to that argument is something along the line of "you can quantify the cost, but you can't quantify the value (i.e. sales upside) and there's no change in business capability? No." Revenue doesn't come into it... money is money. Or perhaps more correctly, value is value.
I used to work for Oracle. I can recall Oracle sales reps telling me how important it was that we internally used the software we sold to our customers, because if we didn't trust it with our own business, why should they trust it with theirs? Maybe Microsoft doesn't think the same way?
Of course, Oracle has so many different software offerings (duplication due to acquisitions, and lots of industry-specific offerings), it couldn't possibly use them all internally. But at least its sales reps could say, that if they weren't using the specific product they were selling, they'd be (for non-industry specific functions) using an equivalent product in Oracle's portfolio.
Agreed, it's definitely not one size fits all. The story of Amazon migrating off Oracle is probably in the same ballpark (if that story is true - I don't know one way or the other). To which point, again... it's a totally valid perspective that you have!
> Amazon’s Consumer business just turned off its final Oracle database (some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated).
No idea what those “third-party applications” are and how significant they are - they could be insignificant fringes or extremely core business systems (such as payroll or general ledger)
If they can't justify the value of their products compared to their competitors internally, how would they ever convince others it's worth it to switch to their product? I mean, it's practically an acknowledgement it's not worth it to switch to their product, because the value really isn't there.
Sometimes decision are not reflection of the merits of the individual options, but of the fundamentals of the challenge. Changing a business platform is an incredibly invasive/disruptive move, with huge costs (money and opportunity) and meager gains. Does not mean that say, Dynamics, is not any good.
It’s a major distraction even if they have money and resources. I am a CFO who has purchased/integrated multiple products from SAP/Oracle/etc (different companies). I’ve never once factored into my purchasing decisions whether they were dogfooding or not. If I was told they were dogfooding, I’d have placed zero value on that. That’s just me though.
Oracle’s own marketing has repeatedly used variations of the slogan “Oracle on Oracle”, to highlight various instances of Oracle moving internal business function X to run on Oracle product Y. [0] I don’t think it has ever been their primary message, just one among many, but it’s been there. Obviously it doesn’t make any impact on some customers, such as yourself. On the other hand, it must work sometimes, or else they surely would have dropped it.
Right, but, don’t they want to sell their product against SAP? They would learn so much and then be dogfooding. I’m not surprised Microsoft hasn’t done this, because Microsoft. Microsoft doesn’t build products for users it builds products for its program managers.
I am sure a company like Microsoft has quite a few unique needs. So just getting everything implemented to even be in a position to dogfood would take away development time which could be better invested to improve the experience for paying or potential customers.
The departments are also not the same, the developers might be happy to have a customer like Microsoft but the hundreds of people using something else today really don't gain anything. They would have to retrain and take on a huge migration. And for a system that has grown for such a long time you can be sure that there are a lot of undocumented edge cases for weird business needs.
Smaller companies have burned millions trying to move off SAP. And there is nothing Microsoft can do or learn to make the migration to their product easier because it's all business problems, not so much technology. Their potential future customers aren't billion dollar companies which are on SAP today.
They didn't say "simple", they said "simpler". If we are talking relative complexity between SAP/Dynamics and Stripe Billing, yeah, billing is "simpler".
Stripe's own claim to fame and much success is making an exceptionally complex topic, like billing, seem simple. It never is. I would imagine most of their own customers have far simpler needs than they themselves do.
FWIW, we're happy Stripe customers, but also candidly do much of our billing outside of of them. Some of the examples GP cited are in a similar boat. Which is all to say that Stripe solves a lot of headaches, but it hasn't solved all of them. I'm sure investors in Stripe see that as a positive opportunity.
If you could wipe out the past and start from day dot then /maybe/ you could transition without too great a risk; even then, you’re looking at a massive transformation project with a lot of temporary contract workers. It’s expensive, because billing fundamentally touches every part of a business - if it breaks, you can’t pay your service providers and you can’t get paid by your clients. Optics doesn’t matter here, dogfooding is a nice bonus and not a given. There’s just no compelling reason for them to move over.
