Disagree on point 2; we see some of SAP's tentacles down here in New Zealand which is about as far from Europe as it's possible to get. Wikipedia seems to think they're pretty global too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG).
Having said that, I don't think it would be the biggest issue anyway; 1 and 3 are much bigger problems for HP and you're spot-on with those.
SAP's US headquarters is near me in Pennsylvania. I interviewed for a software developer job there once. I was told, by the interviewer, that the programming jobs in the US are boring because the real work is done in Germany...
The PA office is a bit of a glorified regional sales office. SAP Labs in Palo Alto however does a lot of interesting and original dev work. There are quite a few very good engineers there who would take real offense at this statement.
C++ developer working at SAP here, so my job is not exactly representative of SAP. That said, it is a very interesting job. We are building a distributed in-memory database that can power lots of SAP applications. We work with server machines with 2TB of RAM, gigantic SSD storage and many, many cores.
You also get to work with application developers who have built the things that run at the core of the major companies in the world, and many of them have decades of experience at this. These applications will likely never be put in the cloud or replaced by something with just a nicer GUI, since the important thing is security, correctness and absolute stability.
So do not rule out companies which seem to do "just boring" stuff when looking for your next job. Enterprise applications can be very challenging (and are also reliable money makers).
From a pure techie point of view you can do great stuff there as a programmer. But the end-result is just nog as sexy as having developed games for an iphone or invented the New Social Thing. But your software scales over 100 gigs of RAM, is blazingly fast and can process transaction records in the order of 10,000s per second; that's non-boring to me :P
Yes... but I think quite many of us older than 23 would rather program SAP than games or Iphone apps, although I wouldn't hazard a guess at the proportion.
Not true. SAP tends to acquire a lot of new companies (with the fight with Oracle heating up in the past couple of years) and a lot of these smaller companies are based around the globe.
The core of some of these applications are not even developed in Waldorf but f.e. in Palo Alto or Seoul; so that interviewer doesn't know what he's talking about.
I should have been more specific. When I say a global company, I mean that every aspect about the company should be global. Having an office in every part of the world doesn't make the company a global company if almost all of the leadership decisions stem out of Germany.
Having said that, I don't think it would be the biggest issue anyway; 1 and 3 are much bigger problems for HP and you're spot-on with those.