For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare."
Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose tools (or worse, amalgamations of multiple single-purpose tools) that came before were absolute shit, and SAP is instead only difficult to use.
Progress!
(Also, a TAM that is literally every company, ever)
The people who are hurt by it are not the people deciding to buy it.
SAP looks great for Csuite executives when it produces reports. For an engineer trying to enter their hours it's an hours long torture session every two weeks.
(Microsoft uses SAP as an ERP).
(This was also my motivation to start my own financial reporting startup: what if we designed a system in the year 2022 to be able to support big businesses without it being as awful as big business software.)
Furthermore, AFAIK Microsoft started using SAP well before they acquired Axapta.
