Many years ago at an Agile Alliance conference, I had the opportunity to hear Dean Leffingwell in a small audience context. I had a turn to ask him a question. I asked him why he felt there was so much negative feeling about SAFe? I expected some answer related tom what SAFe taught or how it worked. Instead, he simply said it was because SAFE "was a market disruptor." He didn't address any of the actual concerns I had heard about SAFe. Instead, he focused on commercial competitiveness, i.e., SAFe was taking business away from other frameworks and people.
Perhaps another reason for its success has to do with its market as you actually suggest. Large corporations can get into SAFe without having to make substantive change in how they operate. Other approaches ask that they make (or at least face the need to) make changes. SAFe apparently does not as you indicate.
Of course, at the team level it is very much like the iterative/incremental approach offered in Scrum, though it does not seem to be fully Scrum. There seems to me to be a good bit of change at the basic level. However, for many levels of management, it would seem things can go on as usual. And they can take the approach that SAFe, like other approaches, is for the people doing the day-to-day work who need to change, but not them.
So it appeals to what I have seen for well over 30 years when new approaches are attempted in large organizations. They are viewed as something to "herd the cats," i.e., "get those folks in development" (or wherever) under better control. But it isn't something they view as implying any change on management's part - at least not above middle management anyway and likely not much at that level.
I recall at an even older Software Engineering Institute Process Group conference hearing a speaker talk about change and how it can stall at middle management levels. He said, that such management (and above) got to where they are by behaving the way they do. Why should they risk changing then? They know how to work in the current system and have also learned that fads come and go. So they "salute the flag" but do as little as possible to change, waiting for the new fad to pass while they do basically what they ave always done.
And people who work for them can see this and invest less effort in the new thing as well.
We can say that SAFe and Scrum and other agile approaches have been successful because of their "market penetration" and the revenue they generate for themselves and others.
The question is has that meant success in significant improvement in organizations or just a change in lower level behaviors?
