This is a viewpoint that I hear a lot, mostly from people who are not in the room when these grand enterprise implementation decisions are made. While it's true that a good salesperson can make a difference in winning a deal vs. another vendor, salespeople almost never convince a company that they need a big enterprise software platform. 95% of the time, the company has already decided that the current way they do X is broken, and now the salesperson can convince them that they have the solution to that.

The truth is that very often, X is broken inside an organization not because of executive management, most of whom don't care what software packages get used or who they buy from or anything else like that, but rather big software companies get brought in because the technology/backoffice organization inside the company is a disaster.

Accounting system doesn't properly allocate widget expenses to different cost centers? Takes a week to update the homepage? No one knows where exactly sensitive data is being stored?

That's all the technology organization's failure in one way or another. And when things get bad enough, senior management says, "Okay, our homegrown accounting system is just not doing the job for us anymore", and here comes Oracle, happy to sell them their accounting system, which has all of the features they could possibly want, and sure, it's expensive, but it works, as opposed to the busted system they've got currently.

Of course, the next failure then, is that the people who will be running and overseeing and architecting this solution are either the same people who cocked up the accounting system in the first place, or consultants who have absolutely zero incentive to do anything other than maximize billable hours.

This means that instead of the organization saying, "We will adapt to off the shelf software and change our processes to better align with the way the software is designed to be used", they say, "Make your software work the way we do things".

Now we're off to the races, as various fiefdoms inside of the big company make their pitch about what needs to be customized. Everything from the layout of the screens to the workflow processes to the data model, everything has to be matched to exactly the way the customer wants to do things.

Back at Oracle HQ, the RFEs have been flying in from not just that customer, but the other 200 new customers being onboarded , and every one is basically a demand for a way to modify this or that option - no one is saying, "We wish there were fewer fields on this page"

So the customers demand more features, Oracle delivers them, and then the customers promptly use those features to further complicate their platforms, because they don't have the technical discipline to say, "No, we really don't need to support different SKU revenue allocations based on currency, we'll just do it by hand at the end of every quarter".

Looking at it a different way - how is making the software simpler going to help Oracle win business? If anything, the more features the product has, the more points they get on the RFP from the next big customer.

So everyone is to blame - Oracle makes money selling and implementing very complex technology solutions because they're answering the demands of their customers who depend on overly complex technical requirements because their technology organizations are poorly run because they don't have any discipline because senior management isn't technical enough to recognize where the failure is.

tl;dr - enterprise software is not broken because of the sales people or upper management, it's broken because the technology organizations are bad at their jobs