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UPCOMING WEBCASTS

WEPOS Gets to the Point
Microsoft Targets Point-of-Service

In the old days, you could take just about any old horse to a race. If it had four legs, a mane, a tail and burned hay, it had as good a chance as any of bringing home the prize. Over time, however, special horses were bred and trained for racing. If you didn’t have one of those specialized horses, there was really no point in showing up. The specialists ruled the roost.

In the old days, you could use just about any embedded operating system for your point-of-service (POS) installation. If you could load your application onto something akin to a cash-register and provide any level of functionality better than the old mechanical beasts, you could make a good market for your embedded system during the register replacement revolution.

As with the horses, however, the POS OS race is now the purview of specialists.

Microsoft is uniquely positioned to play the specialist role in this market. You see, point of service applications invariably have to talk fluently with desktop- and enterprise-level systems in order to deliver the kind of integration that customers crave. That means that it pays for your POS embedded operating system to have connections on the other end of the connection. With more than a bit of ubiquity in those markets, the big MS has a bit of a leg up. Ever hear of Windows? We thought so. [more]