Every single point in this post is inaccurate.
Seriously though, Saul, I am curious where you are gathering your information. Because my conclusions are based on my own eyes and ears when observing these very things at real ERP customers.
I am not talking about trinket software in the cloud or Microsoft Office.
I'm more talking about trinket software and Microsoft Office. And even hybrid cloud deployments w/ other functions and workloads moving to the cloud. I don't know of many companies that are the best at what they do because their IT department is awesome.
And customizing and putting off updates is one of the main reasons so many ERP platforms are mumped to begin with.
OK, that's helpful to know.
For really large companies (I'm talking $Billions in Rev on up), their ERP systems merely reflect the complex requirements of their complex businesses. Customizing wasn't merely some luxurious half baked idea, it was critical to be able to process their volumes with an acceptable level of accuracy.
I've seen the "work arounds" to avoid customizations at places like this, and they involve about a million spreadsheets and a CFO who has 20 different people yapping at him with 20 different reports who each have a different version of the "truth."
A Cloud based ERP package can work well for a smaller firm, or many professional service companies for example (law firms, brokerage, consulting) or companies with very sophisticated front office systems that merely need to jam the GL results into the ERP (but then you are just trading one complex system for the other).
There is a hybrid model, where updates are pushed and queued and the customer gets to selectively adopt them when the timing is right for their own internal retrofit, testing and QA work.
