16 ms·

Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

501 points by ghshephard 10y ago

kbenson 10y ago
This makes sense. As a big player in enterprise, Microsoft is recognizing that there's a new industry that's vastly under served.
- eunoia 10y ago
  Massively underserved. I live in Denver and have friends with ownership stakes in local dispensaries. The quality of their software solutions (mainly POS/Compliance) is laughable. Edit: This (http://www.mjfreeway.com/ http://www.mjfreeway.com/) is the defacto standard. I kid you not it went down for 2 weeks ~a year ago after scheduled maintenance went wrong. At the time it had ~50% market share, this left dispensaries around the country doing all their compliance and POS by hand for weeks. Amateur hour.
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    Hmm. I wonder how dispensaries are different than any other retail / pharmacy operation? Can they treat the product like cold/allergy pills that have to be watched, or does there have to be legal information specific to each "SKU"/item-type???
    - encoderer 10y ago
      Depending on the state, plants need to be tracked from seed to sale. That is just one aspect of it that I'm familiar with. I'm sure the compliance burdens beyond that are significant.
      - eunoia 10y ago
        A combination of federal illegality (which affects banking heavily) and special compliance requirements necessitates custom industry solutions AFAIK.
        eitally 10y ago
        But that's really no different from discrete manufacturing, where you have to track precious metals, hazardous materials, import/export regulations, etc. I wonder why the major players don't just make the minor adaptations so they can serve this market, too.
        lightbritefight 10y ago
        Likely federal law. Its not settled legally if providing services to recreational dispensaries can implicate your company in felony drug distribution. Its unlikely, but a risk. It may even cause issues with the bushiness main product. Things like insurance liability shifts and the like. No "big name" company has wanted to test the waters.
    - TallGuyShort 10y ago
      Not that familiar with it, but part of the issue is that financial institutions above a certain size won't do business with them because it's still illegal at the federal level and they're afraid of the ambiguity. I wouldn't be surprised if that affected what PoS software they could use.
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        Large financial institutions still dont play nicely with internet porn, which really isnt that ambiguous legally. I think a lot of it is PR as well. They dont want to be associated with moraly ambiguous industries
        ethbro 10y ago
        A lot of this is a consequence of the George W Bush presidency, where the DoJ was encouraged to crack down on pornography using obscenity laws. From the histories I've read, one of the levers they used was informal pressure on financing institutions that served the distributors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_Prosecution_Task_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_Prosecution_Task_For...
        xaqfox 10y ago
        I place the blame squarely on the Obama Justice Department's Operation Choke Point. The previous task force was at least targeted towards specific, named, businesses and brought them before a court--not a blanket, de-facto ban caused by threatening financial institutions, directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
  - jnhuynh 10y ago
    It's funny that you mention MJFreeway. Their one of our competitors. I'm an engineer at [Greenbits][1], a marijuana POS system running on almost 50% of stores in Washington State. We were runner up finalists at [2015's Tech Crunch Disrupt][2]. Every quarter, we do visits to stores (some of our customers and those of our competitors). It's amazing to see the state of the industry and how underserved it is. I think part of this is that everyone, retailers and regulators, are still figuring out how to run things. The problem is nuanced because of differences in taxes for recreational and medical, tracking of the product "from seed to sale", and various weird business regulations. We learn a lot of these trips and always come back with a lot of ideas on how to improve our product for our customers and do what our competitors don't. We are visiting Denver, CO in a couple weeks. :D Also, this is a plug, but we are starting to ramp up [hiring][3]. Currently, we only have the Engineering job posting up, but we are looking for a lot of positions and more will be posted up within the next few weeks. [1]:https://www.greenbits.com/ https://www.greenbits.com/ [2]:https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/green-bits-launches-point-of-sale-service-for-cannabis-shops/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/green-bits-launches-point-... [3]:https://jobs.lever.co/greenbits?lever-via=_335J-YDmj https://jobs.lever.co/greenbits?lever-via=_335J-YDmj
    - scruple 10y ago
      Just asking because I saw that the engineering position listed San Jose but it seems that there are remote employees and an office in Portland, as well. Are there opportunities for remote work for the current/future hiring needs?
      - jnhuynh 10y ago
        We do support remote. For example, I'm actually based in the Boston area. However, we are trying to build out a team in San Jose and Portland, so there is definitely a preference for people in the west coast.
    - toomanybeersies 10y ago
      I used to work for a startup doing regular hospitality POS (cafes, bars, etc). It's not just MJ POS systems, it's POS systems in general. I don't know what it is about them, but they seem to attract horrible software solutions. I see you've gone with iPads, we did the same, a lot better than the industry standard touch screen monitor. You'd think that people wouldn't like the smaller screens, but we never got any complaints about it. I guess it's about how you utilise the space. I guess there is always the option to use iPad pros if you really want the real estate, although we actually had a couple of customers using iPad minis instead, I think it was for small stalls or something.
  - copperx 10y ago
    Why can't they use a run-of-the-mill POS? or a POS designed for pharmacies?
  - at-fates-hands 10y ago
    >> Amateur hour. Dude, when nobody wants to be affiliated with your business or be identified as someone who's supporting your business, you have to do what you have to do. It's not like companies are clamoring to support this industry. Yes, people are falling over themselves to invest in these companies, but with federal issues hanging over these places, the cash only aspects and how society looks at these companies (yes, this is slowly changing too) they are in a tough spot to find good software support.
    - rybosome 10y ago
      I think the point of the post was that software can maintain such a large market share in spite of major reliability issues due to the unwillingness for developers to serve that market. "Amateur hour" was a reference to the quality of the software, not the overall operation.
      - at-fates-hands 10y ago
        That's a fair point
  - chiph 10y ago
    A friend of a friend was hired as a CFO at a dispensary, and pretty much had to create an entire accounting system from scratch. Cash management consisted of employees driving around to the store and collecting the money, as the armored car firms wouldn't accept their business. So he set up a subsidiary that went out and bought some armored cars and was able to safely transport the money, staffed with former military. .. they had the cash for it, so why not?
    - aphextron 10y ago
      Why is that? Even software firms don't want to deal with weed?
      - jeromegv 10y ago
        Not so much the software companies, it's the payment processing companies that are risk-averse.
        stephengillie 10y ago
        As a customer, these shops have to jump through some amazing hoops just to provide standard POS debit/credit. One store has to process all payments as an ATM withdrawal, and must give change so the "ATM withdrawal" will round to the nearest $5.
      - chiph 10y ago
        When you buy an accounting system there's a lot of customization that goes on to set up your chart of accounts, configure check printing, etc. They were apparently running the business off an Excel spreadsheet, so even Quickbooks would have been a step up.
  - lbn 10y ago
    Is this a problem due to not being able to buy physical/cloud infrastructure or developers with cannabis money or something else?
- laxatives 10y ago
  Microsoft might be the first to publicly announce it, but I don't think they are the only blue chip company aware of the industry. I've heard Phillip-Morris has been quietly buying out a lot of farms, anticipating federal legalization in the near future, especially since tobacco usage in the US is plummeting.
  - 67726e 10y ago
    Do you have any source on that? The only reason I ask is I've heard that rumor many times over the years. In particular I had a civics teach in high school tell me how as a student he had gone on a tour of a Phillip-Morris (or some major tobacco company) facility and supposedly was told that they were amassing equipment to make Marijuana cigarettes because they thought it was going to be legal in a few years. Seeing how the man was in his late 50s that story has been going around for a while.
    - Haydos585x2 10y ago
      Philip Morris is a pretty big company with a lot of resources. It could just be a long term strategy that they understand might be necessary in the future and spend a small amount on each year to maintain.
  - cdcarter 10y ago
    Salesforce has several partners offering marijuana growing management software - through a branded resale of the SFDC platform, so $CRM is definitely in it.
  - jericsinger 10y ago
    This is not true. It's possible, perhaps probable, that Phillip-Morris employees have invested personally in the industry, but all retail states so far have strict domesticity requirements that no national corporation could satisfy. Colorado's even contemplating a law that forbids publicly traded companies from owning stakes in a licensed entity. But even if this weren't the case, it would make zero business sense for a heavily regulated, multi-billion dollar corporation to invest resources in marijuana right now. The revenue opportunity wouldn't register on their income statement, and would never come close to justifying the additional scrutiny they'd surely receive from regulators. The reasonable strategy for them is to wait until marijuana receives federal blessing and then acquire the best companies or teams available, or try to launch new products backed by massive marketing spend.
godzillabrennus 10y ago
Good. Maybe they can open a cafe on their campus to sell recreational versions so their people can test their tech and try the product. It'd make many developers I know want to work for Microsoft.
- tacos 10y ago
  The biggest pothead team at Microsoft was the Internet Explorer guys. So if you want another 20 years of calculating bounding rectangles incorrectly, by all means let's get the rest of the company baked.
  - harlanlewis 10y ago
    Of course, the old IE box model is what everyone else overrides the default to match nowadays. Maybe they were on to something!
    - PeCaN 10y ago
      A lot of old IE things were pretty nice¹. The only real problem was the abysmal support for actual standards, along with a myriad of weird bugs. ¹ See: XMLHttpRequest, innerHTML, box model, CSS filters, CSS behaviors², VML, etc ² Well, behavior: was probably a terrible idea, but it did allow hacking oldIE to support an awful lot of CSS3.
      - ethbro 10y ago
        Incidentally! I thought about this the other day. Given that it's been about 15 years, is there anyone in the HN community / internet that's spoken about the design decisions with IE 6? Specifically, was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?
        Analemma_ 10y ago
        > was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management? "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Seriously, what a dumb question. The answer is "neither": at the time of its release, IE6 was great. It was way better than its only real competition, Netscape 6, which hadn't seen updates in years. Yes, it had bugs, but all software does. If Microsoft had just given it regular updates, it would've been fine. The issue with IE6 was not that it was bad ab initio, it was that Microsoft abandoned development when they felt they had no competition, so it slipped farther and farther behind web standards.
Drakim 10y ago
What is the legality of marijuana on the federal level in the US? I was under the impression that even if marijuana is legal on a state level you can still get in trouble for it.
- Shank 10y ago
  Federally, it's still illegal. However, there have been statements that they aren't prosecuting or pursuing legal action in states that have legalized it [0]. [0]: http://www.denverpost.com/2013/08/29/federal-government-wont-block-colorado-marijuana-legalization/ http://www.denverpost.com/2013/08/29/federal-government-wont... Edit: For the record, it would still block you from getting a US Government security clearance, and you can still run drug tests on employees and decline them for failing.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    IOW: at the federal level illegal by law, ignored for recreational amounts by executive order (and thus possibly changing when a new executive branch is elected).
  - hackuser 10y ago
    Couldn't that policy be reversed by another president? For example, a President Cruz might not like the idea. In a way, Microsoft getting involved raises the cost of changing the policy; do they want to prosecute or otherwise upset a major corporation?
    - huac 10y ago
      Yes. Federal enforcement is carried out by the DOJ, which is an agency of the Executive Branch. The DOJ serves at the pleasure of the President, so while Obama chooses not to enforce this law currently, he (or the next President) could change their minds at any moment. In practice, Microsoft is betting on their lobbyists to ensure a stable regulatory climate.
- pilom 10y ago
  It is indeed illegal on the federal level. Currently everyone is just an executive order away from crack down on all of it. The guidance that the Obama Administration has been using is not to enforce the law in states where it has been legalized (though they have been cracking down on cases where dispensaries open within 1000 ft of a school). That said, a new president could do whatever they wanted and a crackdown would likely result in an eventual supreme court case that the states would probably lose based on current precedent.
Roboprog 10y ago
So, they'll be plugging in the TVs^H^H^H Monitors for some of the more out of it customers??? (with apologies to Cheech & Chong) Green Screen of Somnolence???
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pboutros 10y ago
Explains what was going on when they bought LinkedIn. /s
- emehrkay 10y ago
  I imagined James Franco and Seth Rogan being in charge of Microsoft making that decision while laughing the way they do in movies.
vegabook 10y ago
Wow Microsoft is tickin' all the cool boxes under Nadella. Never seen such a radical, and it seems, effective, corpo image turnaround. Open source? Check. Ubuntu on Windows? Check. Contribute to BSD? Check. Progressive on pot? Check. Defeat the bots? Check. Gates on chickens? Check. This company is sick/dope/ice cold cool.
- vegabook 10y ago
  Actually, couple of things I forgot. First IMO Microsoft has always been properly credible on programming languages. Right back to MASM. There were 20 years of awful behaviour, but the languages side was always a highlight (I forgive VB but even that was okay for its use case). Also, little things. Anybody looked at Babylon.js? Brilliant, brilliantly documented, and the sense that this Open Source "side project" by a few MS employees is really being given enthusiastic support by the parent, the feeling that it's not going to wither. Strength to strength. I love it.
- spraak 10y ago
  Getting ratchet with the times
  - delecti 10y ago
    In case it wasn't intentional, that's not really what ratchet means. A close approximation would be trashy.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Ads delivered to your computer by Windows? Check. I'd rather have the old Microsoft back. :/
  - simonswords82 10y ago
    Fuck that. The Microsoft under Ballmer was a car crash. I was running a .Net development house at the time and we seriously considered switching tech stack off the back of Microsoft's attitude to everytihng. Now I couldn't be happier we stuck by them.
edoceo 10y ago
I make https://weedtraqr.com/ https://weedtraqr.com/ - we are operational in Washington and Oregon - and now apparently compete with MS. The company Microsoft is working with (Agrisoft) doesn't even operate in WA, or OR yet. And has been sold like two times in the last two years (first to Surna[0] then to Kind[1]) Additionally their "partnership" is really just Agrisoft getting free Azure hosting. The headline is very click-bait. [0] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/surna-inc-acquires-majority-interest-in-agrisoft-development-group-a-leading-cannabis-seed-to-sale-tracking-platform-300017766.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/surna-inc-acquires-m... [1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kind-financial-acquires-the-assets-of-agrisoft-development-group-300104684.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kind-financial-acqui...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- JoblessWonder 10y ago
  One possible thing to take away from this: Your competitor might have an inferior product, market share, etc, but possible has better traditional marketing/PR.
  - edoceo 10y ago
    I prefer to have my customers promote my product. I'm just going to focus on their needs. Its all about HIGH quality. Pun intended.
    - JoblessWonder 10y ago
      No doubt. Always a good strategy. :)
- H0n3sty 10y ago
  Microsoft may seem like a big scary competitor, but they've been dead for some time (1). If all they're doing it providing free hosting then they're not really competing with you. (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
drawkbox 10y ago
Imagine not getting in early on tobacco or alcohol markets. That created tons of wealth. Companies are smart to hop on the end of another prohibition that will be quite lucrative. It is an immense blue ocean.
anonbanker 10y ago
You couldn't pay us[0] to use a microsoft product. We'll stick with OpenBravo[1] and OpenAG Initiative[2] to handle all our enterprise resource needs from seed to customer. 0. http://medicalcannab.is http://medicalcannab.is 1. http://www.openbravo.com/ http://www.openbravo.com/ 2. https://github.com/OpenAgInitiative https://github.com/OpenAgInitiative
hans 10y ago
well then the chatbots are going to get much better ;]
pi-squared 10y ago
Accidental or purposeful "weed" in the photo behind the knee of the guy on the main pic?
- update 10y ago
  Purposeful. It's a play on the Hollywood, California sign. google "Hollyweed"
delbel 10y ago
The system Oregon (and Colorado) uses for recreational is called METRC and is made by a company called Franwell. When I was at training, the spokes person actually asked for hands raised if anyone knew what a REST API was. Their seed-to-sale tracking system (required by law in Oregon), if used for food (just for example) would be able to tell you what corn field, and what corn plant, in Iowa, when and what fertilizer used, in a hamburger you just ate. (to draw an analogy) -- might be a little overkill but it what the current recreational law. The METRC webui I think is bootstrap based and is very nice. I haven't looked at the REST API yet, but their system integrates with RFID tags on the plant and packages itself with chain of custody style controls. http://www.metrc.com/ http://www.metrc.com/ I am user of their system.
- hackuser 10y ago
  If you know: Do you think it is and will be effective? Could illegal vendors, such as Mexican organized crime, find a way into the industry? Let's not forget that organized crime has been involved in many legitimate industries.
  - minikites 10y ago
    Has been and still is, probably. http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/12/opinion/mike-rowe-somebodys-gotta-do-it-ama-questions-answers/ http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/12/opinion/mike-rowe-somebodys-go... > Rowe: "The segments I was most interested in doing but found the most resistance around was that of a rendering facility. ... the Mob is still involved in a surprising number of rendering facilities. Why the Mob has such a rich history in garbage-related industries and rendering-related industries is a conversation beyond my pay grade.
  - Vexs 10y ago
    Probably is- but if the RFID tag says a box weighs 50 pounds, and it comes in weighing 45 pounds, then you can throw up flags. Of course, there's always going to be ways around this sort of stuff, but you just have to raise the cost of getting around them just enough for it to be unprofitable. Also, I've heard that cartel-grade MJ is terrible quality- local cultivation is probably pretty different then whatever shit they can grow.
dragonwriter 10y ago
There is no legal marijuana trade in the US, as all marijuana trade is criminal under federal law, and it's generally a crime to knowingly profit from a crime (and, since drug offenses are covered in RICO, it's another crime to use any profits tired to them in the operation of any business engaged in interstate commerce.) Microsoft may be keeping distant enough not to worry (though perhaps not given their formal partnership with Kind, even if their own offering is only to governments), but Kind is basically betting it's business -- and the personal liberty of its decision makers -- on the willingness of the federal government to extend the informal prosecutorial tolerance of in-state activities related to marijuana that comply with state laws in states which have adopted some form of state legalization to larger interstate enterprises (and on that tolerance continuing at all, which it might well not under a different administration.)
- xiaoma 10y ago
  It also depends on the judiciary.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure there are federal laws against aspects of the marijuana industry which have been long enforced by the judiciary. Shipping it across state lines seems like an obvious example.
  - bdisraeli 10y ago
    This is totally wrong. Previous Supreme Court decisions, especially Gonzales v. Raich, have set a pretty clear precedent that the Federal Government has the authority to criminalize drugs even when their use is legal in a particular state.
    - tamana 10y ago
      Right, it depends on the judiciary.
      - 10y ago
romanovcode 10y ago
I think they do it because they can. Smaller companies are too afraid, MS is too big and they are not going away if someone won't like it. Good to hear, nevertheless.
pritam2020 10y ago
So we will have a new metric like the ballmer peak?
- eduren 10y ago
  Nadella Peak
- bertil 10y ago
  You are not the only one asking. https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/3nhybk/ballmer_peak_substitute_trees_n_for_alcohol/ https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/3nhybk/ballmer_peak_... I have a name for that, but that’s because I did all my university course work with a guy who could not compute statistics without burning a very big one. He had 12 minutes of brain left after he was done smoking, and what I said stopped making sense to him passed that limit, like clock-work. “Sorry, gotta smoke for that conversation” was his signal he was happy to talk about improving our latest model, but… he needed psychotropic help for that.
joaoaccarvalho 10y ago
Job interviews be like: "How often do you smoke marijuana?"
planetmcd 10y ago
Maybe that is why the forced the latest update?
bashmohandes 10y ago
Gives a whole new meaning to Cloud Computing.
mwsherman 10y ago
This is a good example of an enormous chilling effect that legal risk offers. Not just prohibition of drugs, but any large regulatory regimes where it’s hard to say what “legal” is. Big categories of software go underdeveloped, leaving an industry in the dark ages. It’s one reason why medical software is so bad – being on the wrong side of legal risk is too dangerous.
ClassyPuff 10y ago
Brave BTW...!
dreamdu5t 10y ago
What a cumbersome, wasteful, unnecessary regulatory system. It says a lot about the US that the food they eat does not have this level of monitoring and regulation (to track outbreaks like E. Coli) but marijuana does, despite not killing anyone.
MikeHolman 10y ago
Regardless of actual amount of effort Microsoft is putting here, just putting their feet in the water and showing interest is a very smart move. Marijuana is poised to become a multibillion dollar industry, and Microsoft (being based in WA) is in a unique position among the tech giants to capitalize.
donw 10y ago
Pretty sure that distinction goes to Taco Bell...
Animats 10y ago
This is more like "Kind becomes Microsoft Certified Solution Provider". Not really big news.
musgrove 10y ago
This seems to be a pretty certain thing that they know what the decision will be about re-classifying pot. Not to mention the legalization of it nationally. I would hope.
antsam 10y ago
Did somebody make a joke about "the cloud" yet?
Razengan 10y ago
I'm still hoping for Apple to release macOS Weed someday.
solutions16 10y ago
Need an e-c council(cehv7)& comptia certified expert hacker to dig into any websites? Background checks,data base infiltration,emails,social networks and cloud hacks,grades,transcripts, anything ! Reach the impact Team private investigators via (302) 365-0294 OR EMAIL consultanthackers@outlook.com

501 points by ghshephard 10y ago

This makes sense. As a big player in enterprise, Microsoft is recognizing that there's a new industry that's vastly under served.

eunoia 10y ago
Massively underserved. I live in Denver and have friends with ownership stakes in local dispensaries. The quality of their software solutions (mainly POS/Compliance) is laughable. Edit: This (http://www.mjfreeway.com/ http://www.mjfreeway.com/) is the defacto standard. I kid you not it went down for 2 weeks ~a year ago after scheduled maintenance went wrong. At the time it had ~50% market share, this left dispensaries around the country doing all their compliance and POS by hand for weeks. Amateur hour.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  Hmm. I wonder how dispensaries are different than any other retail / pharmacy operation? Can they treat the product like cold/allergy pills that have to be watched, or does there have to be legal information specific to each "SKU"/item-type???
  - encoderer 10y ago
    Depending on the state, plants need to be tracked from seed to sale. That is just one aspect of it that I'm familiar with. I'm sure the compliance burdens beyond that are significant.
    - eunoia 10y ago
      A combination of federal illegality (which affects banking heavily) and special compliance requirements necessitates custom industry solutions AFAIK.
      - eitally 10y ago
        But that's really no different from discrete manufacturing, where you have to track precious metals, hazardous materials, import/export regulations, etc. I wonder why the major players don't just make the minor adaptations so they can serve this market, too.
        lightbritefight 10y ago
        Likely federal law. Its not settled legally if providing services to recreational dispensaries can implicate your company in felony drug distribution. Its unlikely, but a risk. It may even cause issues with the bushiness main product. Things like insurance liability shifts and the like. No "big name" company has wanted to test the waters.
  - TallGuyShort 10y ago
    Not that familiar with it, but part of the issue is that financial institutions above a certain size won't do business with them because it's still illegal at the federal level and they're afraid of the ambiguity. I wouldn't be surprised if that affected what PoS software they could use.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      Large financial institutions still dont play nicely with internet porn, which really isnt that ambiguous legally. I think a lot of it is PR as well. They dont want to be associated with moraly ambiguous industries
      - ethbro 10y ago
        A lot of this is a consequence of the George W Bush presidency, where the DoJ was encouraged to crack down on pornography using obscenity laws. From the histories I've read, one of the levers they used was informal pressure on financing institutions that served the distributors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_Prosecution_Task_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_Prosecution_Task_For...
        xaqfox 10y ago
        I place the blame squarely on the Obama Justice Department's Operation Choke Point. The previous task force was at least targeted towards specific, named, businesses and brought them before a court--not a blanket, de-facto ban caused by threatening financial institutions, directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
- jnhuynh 10y ago
  It's funny that you mention MJFreeway. Their one of our competitors. I'm an engineer at [Greenbits][1], a marijuana POS system running on almost 50% of stores in Washington State. We were runner up finalists at [2015's Tech Crunch Disrupt][2]. Every quarter, we do visits to stores (some of our customers and those of our competitors). It's amazing to see the state of the industry and how underserved it is. I think part of this is that everyone, retailers and regulators, are still figuring out how to run things. The problem is nuanced because of differences in taxes for recreational and medical, tracking of the product "from seed to sale", and various weird business regulations. We learn a lot of these trips and always come back with a lot of ideas on how to improve our product for our customers and do what our competitors don't. We are visiting Denver, CO in a couple weeks. :D Also, this is a plug, but we are starting to ramp up [hiring][3]. Currently, we only have the Engineering job posting up, but we are looking for a lot of positions and more will be posted up within the next few weeks. [1]:https://www.greenbits.com/ https://www.greenbits.com/ [2]:https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/green-bits-launches-point-of-sale-service-for-cannabis-shops/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/green-bits-launches-point-... [3]:https://jobs.lever.co/greenbits?lever-via=_335J-YDmj https://jobs.lever.co/greenbits?lever-via=_335J-YDmj
  - scruple 10y ago
    Just asking because I saw that the engineering position listed San Jose but it seems that there are remote employees and an office in Portland, as well. Are there opportunities for remote work for the current/future hiring needs?
    - jnhuynh 10y ago
      We do support remote. For example, I'm actually based in the Boston area. However, we are trying to build out a team in San Jose and Portland, so there is definitely a preference for people in the west coast.
  - toomanybeersies 10y ago
    I used to work for a startup doing regular hospitality POS (cafes, bars, etc). It's not just MJ POS systems, it's POS systems in general. I don't know what it is about them, but they seem to attract horrible software solutions. I see you've gone with iPads, we did the same, a lot better than the industry standard touch screen monitor. You'd think that people wouldn't like the smaller screens, but we never got any complaints about it. I guess it's about how you utilise the space. I guess there is always the option to use iPad pros if you really want the real estate, although we actually had a couple of customers using iPad minis instead, I think it was for small stalls or something.
- copperx 10y ago
  Why can't they use a run-of-the-mill POS? or a POS designed for pharmacies?
- at-fates-hands 10y ago
  >> Amateur hour. Dude, when nobody wants to be affiliated with your business or be identified as someone who's supporting your business, you have to do what you have to do. It's not like companies are clamoring to support this industry. Yes, people are falling over themselves to invest in these companies, but with federal issues hanging over these places, the cash only aspects and how society looks at these companies (yes, this is slowly changing too) they are in a tough spot to find good software support.
  - rybosome 10y ago
    I think the point of the post was that software can maintain such a large market share in spite of major reliability issues due to the unwillingness for developers to serve that market. "Amateur hour" was a reference to the quality of the software, not the overall operation.
    - at-fates-hands 10y ago
      That's a fair point
- chiph 10y ago
  A friend of a friend was hired as a CFO at a dispensary, and pretty much had to create an entire accounting system from scratch. Cash management consisted of employees driving around to the store and collecting the money, as the armored car firms wouldn't accept their business. So he set up a subsidiary that went out and bought some armored cars and was able to safely transport the money, staffed with former military. .. they had the cash for it, so why not?
  - aphextron 10y ago
    Why is that? Even software firms don't want to deal with weed?
    - jeromegv 10y ago
      Not so much the software companies, it's the payment processing companies that are risk-averse.
      - stephengillie 10y ago
        As a customer, these shops have to jump through some amazing hoops just to provide standard POS debit/credit. One store has to process all payments as an ATM withdrawal, and must give change so the "ATM withdrawal" will round to the nearest $5.
    - chiph 10y ago
      When you buy an accounting system there's a lot of customization that goes on to set up your chart of accounts, configure check printing, etc. They were apparently running the business off an Excel spreadsheet, so even Quickbooks would have been a step up.
- lbn 10y ago
  Is this a problem due to not being able to buy physical/cloud infrastructure or developers with cannabis money or something else?
laxatives 10y ago
Microsoft might be the first to publicly announce it, but I don't think they are the only blue chip company aware of the industry. I've heard Phillip-Morris has been quietly buying out a lot of farms, anticipating federal legalization in the near future, especially since tobacco usage in the US is plummeting.
- 67726e 10y ago
  Do you have any source on that? The only reason I ask is I've heard that rumor many times over the years. In particular I had a civics teach in high school tell me how as a student he had gone on a tour of a Phillip-Morris (or some major tobacco company) facility and supposedly was told that they were amassing equipment to make Marijuana cigarettes because they thought it was going to be legal in a few years. Seeing how the man was in his late 50s that story has been going around for a while.
  - Haydos585x2 10y ago
    Philip Morris is a pretty big company with a lot of resources. It could just be a long term strategy that they understand might be necessary in the future and spend a small amount on each year to maintain.
- cdcarter 10y ago
  Salesforce has several partners offering marijuana growing management software - through a branded resale of the SFDC platform, so $CRM is definitely in it.
- jericsinger 10y ago
  This is not true. It's possible, perhaps probable, that Phillip-Morris employees have invested personally in the industry, but all retail states so far have strict domesticity requirements that no national corporation could satisfy. Colorado's even contemplating a law that forbids publicly traded companies from owning stakes in a licensed entity. But even if this weren't the case, it would make zero business sense for a heavily regulated, multi-billion dollar corporation to invest resources in marijuana right now. The revenue opportunity wouldn't register on their income statement, and would never come close to justifying the additional scrutiny they'd surely receive from regulators. The reasonable strategy for them is to wait until marijuana receives federal blessing and then acquire the best companies or teams available, or try to launch new products backed by massive marketing spend.

godzillabrennus 10y ago

Good. Maybe they can open a cafe on their campus to sell recreational versions so their people can test their tech and try the product. It'd make many developers I know want to work for Microsoft.

tacos 10y ago
The biggest pothead team at Microsoft was the Internet Explorer guys. So if you want another 20 years of calculating bounding rectangles incorrectly, by all means let's get the rest of the company baked.
- harlanlewis 10y ago
  Of course, the old IE box model is what everyone else overrides the default to match nowadays. Maybe they were on to something!
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    A lot of old IE things were pretty nice¹. The only real problem was the abysmal support for actual standards, along with a myriad of weird bugs. ¹ See: XMLHttpRequest, innerHTML, box model, CSS filters, CSS behaviors², VML, etc ² Well, behavior: was probably a terrible idea, but it did allow hacking oldIE to support an awful lot of CSS3.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      Incidentally! I thought about this the other day. Given that it's been about 15 years, is there anyone in the HN community / internet that's spoken about the design decisions with IE 6? Specifically, was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?
      - Analemma_ 10y ago
        > was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management? "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Seriously, what a dumb question. The answer is "neither": at the time of its release, IE6 was great. It was way better than its only real competition, Netscape 6, which hadn't seen updates in years. Yes, it had bugs, but all software does. If Microsoft had just given it regular updates, it would've been fine. The issue with IE6 was not that it was bad ab initio, it was that Microsoft abandoned development when they felt they had no competition, so it slipped farther and farther behind web standards.

Drakim 10y ago

What is the legality of marijuana on the federal level in the US? I was under the impression that even if marijuana is legal on a state level you can still get in trouble for it.

Shank 10y ago
Federally, it's still illegal. However, there have been statements that they aren't prosecuting or pursuing legal action in states that have legalized it [0]. [0]: http://www.denverpost.com/2013/08/29/federal-government-wont-block-colorado-marijuana-legalization/ http://www.denverpost.com/2013/08/29/federal-government-wont... Edit: For the record, it would still block you from getting a US Government security clearance, and you can still run drug tests on employees and decline them for failing.
- ethbro 10y ago
  IOW: at the federal level illegal by law, ignored for recreational amounts by executive order (and thus possibly changing when a new executive branch is elected).
- hackuser 10y ago
  Couldn't that policy be reversed by another president? For example, a President Cruz might not like the idea. In a way, Microsoft getting involved raises the cost of changing the policy; do they want to prosecute or otherwise upset a major corporation?
  - huac 10y ago
    Yes. Federal enforcement is carried out by the DOJ, which is an agency of the Executive Branch. The DOJ serves at the pleasure of the President, so while Obama chooses not to enforce this law currently, he (or the next President) could change their minds at any moment. In practice, Microsoft is betting on their lobbyists to ensure a stable regulatory climate.
pilom 10y ago
It is indeed illegal on the federal level. Currently everyone is just an executive order away from crack down on all of it. The guidance that the Obama Administration has been using is not to enforce the law in states where it has been legalized (though they have been cracking down on cases where dispensaries open within 1000 ft of a school). That said, a new president could do whatever they wanted and a crackdown would likely result in an eventual supreme court case that the states would probably lose based on current precedent.

Roboprog 10y ago

So, they'll be plugging in the TVs^H^H^H Monitors for some of the more out of it customers??? (with apologies to Cheech & Chong) Green Screen of Somnolence???

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pboutros 10y ago

Explains what was going on when they bought LinkedIn. /s

emehrkay 10y ago
I imagined James Franco and Seth Rogan being in charge of Microsoft making that decision while laughing the way they do in movies.

vegabook 10y ago

Wow Microsoft is tickin' all the cool boxes under Nadella. Never seen such a radical, and it seems, effective, corpo image turnaround. Open source? Check. Ubuntu on Windows? Check. Contribute to BSD? Check. Progressive on pot? Check. Defeat the bots? Check. Gates on chickens? Check. This company is sick/dope/ice cold cool.

vegabook 10y ago
Actually, couple of things I forgot. First IMO Microsoft has always been properly credible on programming languages. Right back to MASM. There were 20 years of awful behaviour, but the languages side was always a highlight (I forgive VB but even that was okay for its use case). Also, little things. Anybody looked at Babylon.js? Brilliant, brilliantly documented, and the sense that this Open Source "side project" by a few MS employees is really being given enthusiastic support by the parent, the feeling that it's not going to wither. Strength to strength. I love it.
spraak 10y ago
Getting ratchet with the times
- delecti 10y ago
  In case it wasn't intentional, that's not really what ratchet means. A close approximation would be trashy.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
Ads delivered to your computer by Windows? Check. I'd rather have the old Microsoft back. :/
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Fuck that. The Microsoft under Ballmer was a car crash. I was running a .Net development house at the time and we seriously considered switching tech stack off the back of Microsoft's attitude to everytihng. Now I couldn't be happier we stuck by them.

edoceo 10y ago

I make https://weedtraqr.com/ https://weedtraqr.com/ - we are operational in Washington and Oregon - and now apparently compete with MS. The company Microsoft is working with (Agrisoft) doesn't even operate in WA, or OR yet. And has been sold like two times in the last two years (first to Surna[0] then to Kind[1]) Additionally their "partnership" is really just Agrisoft getting free Azure hosting. The headline is very click-bait. [0] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/surna-inc-acquires-majority-interest-in-agrisoft-development-group-a-leading-cannabis-seed-to-sale-tracking-platform-300017766.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/surna-inc-acquires-m... [1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kind-financial-acquires-the-assets-of-agrisoft-development-group-300104684.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kind-financial-acqui...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
JoblessWonder 10y ago
One possible thing to take away from this: Your competitor might have an inferior product, market share, etc, but possible has better traditional marketing/PR.
- edoceo 10y ago
  I prefer to have my customers promote my product. I'm just going to focus on their needs. Its all about HIGH quality. Pun intended.
  - JoblessWonder 10y ago
    No doubt. Always a good strategy. :)
H0n3sty 10y ago
Microsoft may seem like a big scary competitor, but they've been dead for some time (1). If all they're doing it providing free hosting then they're not really competing with you. (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

drawkbox 10y ago

Imagine not getting in early on tobacco or alcohol markets. That created tons of wealth. Companies are smart to hop on the end of another prohibition that will be quite lucrative. It is an immense blue ocean.

anonbanker 10y ago

You couldn't pay us[0] to use a microsoft product. We'll stick with OpenBravo[1] and OpenAG Initiative[2] to handle all our enterprise resource needs from seed to customer. 0. http://medicalcannab.is http://medicalcannab.is 1. http://www.openbravo.com/ http://www.openbravo.com/ 2. https://github.com/OpenAgInitiative https://github.com/OpenAgInitiative

hans 10y ago

well then the chatbots are going to get much better ;]

pi-squared 10y ago

Accidental or purposeful "weed" in the photo behind the knee of the guy on the main pic?

update 10y ago
Purposeful. It's a play on the Hollywood, California sign. google "Hollyweed"

delbel 10y ago

The system Oregon (and Colorado) uses for recreational is called METRC and is made by a company called Franwell. When I was at training, the spokes person actually asked for hands raised if anyone knew what a REST API was. Their seed-to-sale tracking system (required by law in Oregon), if used for food (just for example) would be able to tell you what corn field, and what corn plant, in Iowa, when and what fertilizer used, in a hamburger you just ate. (to draw an analogy) -- might be a little overkill but it what the current recreational law. The METRC webui I think is bootstrap based and is very nice. I haven't looked at the REST API yet, but their system integrates with RFID tags on the plant and packages itself with chain of custody style controls. http://www.metrc.com/ http://www.metrc.com/ I am user of their system.

hackuser 10y ago
If you know: Do you think it is and will be effective? Could illegal vendors, such as Mexican organized crime, find a way into the industry? Let's not forget that organized crime has been involved in many legitimate industries.
- minikites 10y ago
  Has been and still is, probably. http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/12/opinion/mike-rowe-somebodys-gotta-do-it-ama-questions-answers/ http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/12/opinion/mike-rowe-somebodys-go... > Rowe: "The segments I was most interested in doing but found the most resistance around was that of a rendering facility. ... the Mob is still involved in a surprising number of rendering facilities. Why the Mob has such a rich history in garbage-related industries and rendering-related industries is a conversation beyond my pay grade.
- Vexs 10y ago
  Probably is- but if the RFID tag says a box weighs 50 pounds, and it comes in weighing 45 pounds, then you can throw up flags. Of course, there's always going to be ways around this sort of stuff, but you just have to raise the cost of getting around them just enough for it to be unprofitable. Also, I've heard that cartel-grade MJ is terrible quality- local cultivation is probably pretty different then whatever shit they can grow.

dragonwriter 10y ago

There is no legal marijuana trade in the US, as all marijuana trade is criminal under federal law, and it's generally a crime to knowingly profit from a crime (and, since drug offenses are covered in RICO, it's another crime to use any profits tired to them in the operation of any business engaged in interstate commerce.) Microsoft may be keeping distant enough not to worry (though perhaps not given their formal partnership with Kind, even if their own offering is only to governments), but Kind is basically betting it's business -- and the personal liberty of its decision makers -- on the willingness of the federal government to extend the informal prosecutorial tolerance of in-state activities related to marijuana that comply with state laws in states which have adopted some form of state legalization to larger interstate enterprises (and on that tolerance continuing at all, which it might well not under a different administration.)

xiaoma 10y ago
It also depends on the judiciary.
- hackuser 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure there are federal laws against aspects of the marijuana industry which have been long enforced by the judiciary. Shipping it across state lines seems like an obvious example.
- bdisraeli 10y ago
  This is totally wrong. Previous Supreme Court decisions, especially Gonzales v. Raich, have set a pretty clear precedent that the Federal Government has the authority to criminalize drugs even when their use is legal in a particular state.
  - tamana 10y ago
    Right, it depends on the judiciary.
    - 10y ago

romanovcode 10y ago

I think they do it because they can. Smaller companies are too afraid, MS is too big and they are not going away if someone won't like it. Good to hear, nevertheless.

pritam2020 10y ago

So we will have a new metric like the ballmer peak?

eduren 10y ago
Nadella Peak
bertil 10y ago
You are not the only one asking. https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/3nhybk/ballmer_peak_substitute_trees_n_for_alcohol/ https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/3nhybk/ballmer_peak_... I have a name for that, but that’s because I did all my university course work with a guy who could not compute statistics without burning a very big one. He had 12 minutes of brain left after he was done smoking, and what I said stopped making sense to him passed that limit, like clock-work. “Sorry, gotta smoke for that conversation” was his signal he was happy to talk about improving our latest model, but… he needed psychotropic help for that.

joaoaccarvalho 10y ago

Job interviews be like: "How often do you smoke marijuana?"

planetmcd 10y ago

Maybe that is why the forced the latest update?

bashmohandes 10y ago

Gives a whole new meaning to Cloud Computing.

mwsherman 10y ago

This is a good example of an enormous chilling effect that legal risk offers. Not just prohibition of drugs, but any large regulatory regimes where it’s hard to say what “legal” is. Big categories of software go underdeveloped, leaving an industry in the dark ages. It’s one reason why medical software is so bad – being on the wrong side of legal risk is too dangerous.

ClassyPuff 10y ago

Brave BTW...!

dreamdu5t 10y ago

What a cumbersome, wasteful, unnecessary regulatory system. It says a lot about the US that the food they eat does not have this level of monitoring and regulation (to track outbreaks like E. Coli) but marijuana does, despite not killing anyone.

MikeHolman 10y ago

Regardless of actual amount of effort Microsoft is putting here, just putting their feet in the water and showing interest is a very smart move. Marijuana is poised to become a multibillion dollar industry, and Microsoft (being based in WA) is in a unique position among the tech giants to capitalize.

donw 10y ago

Pretty sure that distinction goes to Taco Bell...

Animats 10y ago

This is more like "Kind becomes Microsoft Certified Solution Provider". Not really big news.

musgrove 10y ago

This seems to be a pretty certain thing that they know what the decision will be about re-classifying pot. Not to mention the legalization of it nationally. I would hope.

antsam 10y ago

Did somebody make a joke about "the cloud" yet?

Razengan 10y ago

I'm still hoping for Apple to release macOS Weed someday.

solutions16 10y ago

Need an e-c council(cehv7)& comptia certified expert hacker to dig into any websites? Background checks,data base infiltration,emails,social networks and cloud hacks,grades,transcripts, anything ! Reach the impact Team private investigators via (302) 365-0294 OR EMAIL consultanthackers@outlook.com