A lot of people are screwed at once when things go south.
Month: September 2015
Razor Software
It dawned on me that the VMS software, in many cases, are equivalent to razors… or pizzas, or burgers. It’s reaching the point where it’s really hard to sell anything better than just “good enough”. Sure, there are 5-blade razors with gels to soothe the skin, and there are “gourmet” burgers and pizzas (I still prefer Wendy’s, and I’ve been to a lot of burger places). So unless you can sell some sort of “experience”, when peddling easily fungible goods, you’ll be competing on price.
I recently was on vacation in Greece and I noticed that the cash register software was (apparently) DOS based, and hadn’t been updated since 2004. The service was as fast as anywhere else, and the software had no issue looking up the price of an item as quickly as the operator could scan the barcode or manually key in the item. A local hardware store here in Copenhagen has a similar system, and the Luddite discount supermarket chain, Aldi, didn’t have barcode scanners until recently.
In the good old days (of scurvy and gout), the store would simply write down what was sold, and at what price in a little black book. Back then, I doubt there were price tags on items, as it was the Quakers who introduced fixed prices.
The first register came about when saloon owner, James Ritty got fed up with his employees stealing from him, so he invented the cash register. A contraption he called the “Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier”. Soon after, the invention was sold to the company that later became NCR.
NCR went on to add bookkeeping features to the cash register, so not only would you prevent the employees from stealing (it’s intended purpose), but it would also make your life easier as a shop-keeper.
Electronic cash registers was the next step. Clearly, going from a mechanical contraption to an electronic version made sense. It was cheaper, more reliable, faster and had more features.
Then came the DOS based POS systems that offered yet more flexibility, were easier to use and could interface with more printers and cash drawers.
Today, the local hipster hangout coffee shop down the street is now using an iPad with a credit card scanner attached.
As I see it, the embedded electronic register is equivalent to a DVR with some NTSC cameras. The DOS based register corresponds to the windows based IP video recorders that are fairly common today. And finally, a plug’n play video surveillance solution in the DropCam vein is peered to the iPad POS software.
My thinking is this: A tool that solves a particular, well defined problem, won’t be upgraded, at least not until the new tool offers a substantially better ROI. Adding bookkeeping to the mechanical cash made sense, but I doubt people replaced their old working mechanical registers with the slightly improved variant. New customers will buy the feature-rich variant if the price points are similar, but it’s very hard to change a substantial premium for features that really aren’t needed. And even harder to convince people to replace a working system with something more expensive, but only offers marginally useful features. I suspect that the reason I am seeing a lot of stores with DOS (or DOS-like) registers, is because the functionality is simply good enough, and there’s no meaningful ROI on upgrading to a, say, Windows 10 or iOS version.
And that brings me to VMS systems. Clearly, the analog systems were a pain in the ass. Tapes that were worn out, rendering the system useless when something did happen. Terrible low light performance and so on. The DVR systems were substantially better, causing people to upgrade. And for a while, IP based cameras were very, very expensive, but as prices came down, they started to offer a substantially better ROI than DVRs (in many respects, but not all).
The key point here is “good enough”: I don’t think we are quite there yet, but eventually we will arrive at a point where all VMS/NVRs will be pretty much plug and play. It’ll be a piece of cake to replace a camera (why the hell is this still a challenge on some VMSs?), hopefully no-one is going to spend hours tweaking resolutions, messing around with VBR and CBR, or mess around with “motion sensitivity” settings.
If I had my way, I’d let the “other guys” come up with new condiments, and ways to serve their turd-sandwiches, and instead offer cupcakes. Some people don’t like cupcakes, some prefer donuts, but I bet you that most people would pick a cupcake over any turd-sandwich. There are always people that complain, monday-morning-quarterbacks (some made a career of it), who demand some weird condiment that comes with turd-sandwich #2, and in some cases, sinking your teeth into a turd-sandwich is simply the only way to achieve some narrow goal.
I bet that once someone offers a cupcake, it’s game over for the turd-sandwich stores.
Prescienta's Blog 