Ideas That Didn’t Make The Cut

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
Ken Robinson, The Element

At Mindset, we’ve established an unparalleled track record of extraordinary innovation. Try SAP GUI for Robots, SAP GUI for Tesla Model 3, or SAP GUI for Apple Watch to see just how far-reaching our capabilities have grown over the years. But just like Einstein and Edison, we’ve had to work our way through failures to arrive at our groundbreaking creations. Here’s a look at some of our ideas and tag-lines that never saw the light of day.

SAP for Hot Dog Vendors™: All The Fixin’s.

  • The Idea: Run an SAP instance in the bottom of your hot dog cart.
  • Issues:
    • Cost of software thousands of times typical vendor revenue.

SAP GUI For Giants™: Big Value, Big Footprint.

  • The Idea: Use skywriting to make SAP GUI usable for giants.
  • Issues:
    • Slow UI refresh rate – every new screen needs to be redrawn in the sky with expensive fuel, pilots, planes.
    • UI not available on cloudy days or at night.
    • Unable to find any giants for beta test.

SAP GUI For The International Space Station™: Research At The Speed Of Enterprise.

  • The Idea: Beautiful touch screen interfaces specially designed for ease of transactions at zero-g.
  • Issues:
    • Costly to set up and maintain orbital sandbox, dev, qa, pre-prod, prod environments.
    • No actual rocket scientists on staff at Mindset.
    • Total addressable market: 1.
    • Tagline “speed of enterprise” does not convey the idea of speed.

SAP GUI For Alien Invasions™: Please Don’t Hurt Us.

  • The Idea: Fully integrate invasion force and subjugated Earthlings. Efficient negotiation of humanity’s surrender.
  • Issues:
    • Costly to set up PI interface to potential non-binary-based-computing partner profile.
    • Alien forces unlikely to pause invasion for 2-year implementation cycle.

SAP GUI For Ants™: Little Screens, Huge Impact.

  • The Idea: Keep the colony in sync. Clever renaming of batch jobs to “colony” jobs.
  • Issues:
    • High training effort: ants don’t appear to know how to use software. 
    • Display technology not yet available at appropriate size.

Paul Modderman loves creating things and sharing them. He has spoken at SAP TechEd, multiple ASUG regional events, ASUG Fall Focus, Google DevFest MN, Google ISV Days, and several webinars and SAP community gatherings. Paul's writing has been featured in SAP Professional Journal, on the SAPinsider blog, and the popular Mindset blog. He believes clear communication is just as important as code, but also has serious developer chops. His tech career has spanned web applications with technologies like .NET, Java, Python, and React to SAP soutions in ABAP, OData and SAPUI5. His work integrating Google, Fiori, and Android was featured at SAP SAPPHIRE. Paul was principal technical architect on Mindset's certified solutions CloudSimple and Analytics for BW. He's an SAP Developer Hero, honored in 2017. Paul is the author of two books: Mindset Perspectives: SAP Development Tips, Tricks, and Projects, and SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori: The Psychology of UX Design. His passion for innovative application architecture and tech evangelism shines through in everything he does.

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