On November 10, I published this here
At the request of suppliers and other stakeholders in the newsagency channel, Tower Systems has put together an offer to help newsagents who want to shift from the out of date POS Solutions DOS software. Newsagents with this out of date software risk becoming the excuse for suppliers ignoring newsagents. Email the Tower sales team for further information.
On November 12, Bernard Zimmermann wrote at his POS Solutions blog:
At the request of suppliers and other stakeholders in the newsagency channel, POS Solutions has put together an offer to help newsagents who want to shift from what I consider simple Tower software. Newsagents with this software risk becoming the excuse for suppliers ignoring newsagents. Email the POS Solutions for further information.
The key difference is that my post is truthful and Bernard’s is not. His company has not been asked to help newsagents to move from Tower Systems to POS Solutions.
My sense is that POS is in all sorts of trouble. I have been asked, by newsagent suppliers, to help people shift from POS. They have lost a ton of users this year and 2007 is not over – switching not only to Tower but also to other companies. I think this is happening because newsagents are sick of poor support and mediocre software. POS has become a joke at discussions about compliance with suppliers giving up even discussing possible changes with them because of the push-back they have received in the past.
Zimmermann demonstrates lack of leadership by publishing as his own work blog posts I have published here. It says a lot about their approach to software innovation. Newsagents deserve better.
UPDATE: Two hours after I posted this, Bernard put a comment on his own blog post indicating that his post was a joke. I’ll let newsagents decide who is telling the truth about software quality and customer service.
To quote Bernard “So although we keep hearing DOS is dead, something that a progressive company like Harvey Norman does not know, as they use it”
I can tell you now as an ex-harvey norman employee, They have been trying to get away from DOS for many years. Although its been a couple of years since i stopped working for them, i notice they are still using it now for whatever reason (allbeit a bit more enhanced). I saw beta windows versions and also PDA versions for sales people to use on the floor.
Harvey Norman’s DOS Point of sale sytems was/is full of bugs and gave constant problems.
DOS is dead
We are currently using the POS dos-based system. The hardware we received with it includes barcode printers that use a serial port connection and cash registers and printers that use a parallel port connection. The last time we replaced our old and failing computers we had a hell of a time trying to find motherboards with serial and parallel ports on them as these technologies are being phased out – serial mice in favour of ps/2 mice and parallel port printers in favour of usb printers (which won’t work with POS’s dos-based system even with parallel port emulation software that is good enough to fool window into thinking the usb printer is a parallel port printer as well).
I shudder to think how we’re going to get on the next time we need to replace our machines.