
Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade - ghshephard
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/business/dealbook/microsoft-following-the-clouds-to-offer-marijuana-tracking-software.html
======
edoceo
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-m...](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)

[1] [http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kind-financial-
acqui...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kind-financial-acquires-the-
assets-of-agrisoft-development-group-300104684.html)

~~~
H0n3sty
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)

~~~
achr2
Microsoft is nowhere near dead, not in the short to medium term anyway - and
if you're a startup, that is all that matters. MS can put a 100 million
dollars into a product sphere and not bat an eye if it fails within a few
years (see Nokia). I wouldn't discount them anytime soon.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Yes, but startups execute faster than big companies. They also make
bigger/riskier bets.

------
delbel
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
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.

~~~
Vexs
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.

~~~
oxide
in my neck of the woods in CA, dispensaries aren't going to buy cartel brick
weed. you can't just walk in off the street and sell to a dispensary anyway, I
don't think that will change with a move to recreational legalization.

cartels can't compete with local street prices anyway, never mind recreational
dispensaries. when you can get an 1/8th ounce of high quality stuff for 25
dollars off-season, and an a full ounce for 100 or less during harvest season,
you can barely give the low quality stuff away. it usually gets used for hash
or edible baking.

cartels know where they can and can't compete, that low quality brick weed is
much better off being shipped to another state where they can sell it for 100
dollars an ounce.

~~~
barefootcoder
Can you explain to those of us who have never used nor purchased why it would
be more expensive during the harvest season than the off season? Or did you
get the numbers backwards?

EDIT: thanks to those who replied -- I didn't notice the change in units.

~~~
qq66
The comparison was between 1/8 of an ounce for $25 ($200 per ounce) and $100
per ounce during the harvest season.

~~~
barefootcoder
Thank you -- I need to check my reading comprehension. I didn't notice the
change in units. :-)

------
dragonwriter
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.)

~~~
will_brown
> as all marijuana trade is criminal under federal law

You may be right because of the word _trade_ ; however, the Federal government
itself has authorized the growing (University of Mississippi) and interstate
distribution of legal marijuana since 1976 through CIND.

Not trying to split hairs, because the total patient list has probably always
been under a dozen people, but it is still an interesting fact and one I only
know of because I randomly represented one of the Federal patients in a
corporate capacity. Each patient dosage is individualized, and the Federal
government gives my client 360 joints per month.

~~~
MikeHolman
360 joints per month? That's an absolutely insane amount of marijuana. Even if
marijuana isn't inherently unhealthy, I have to imagine it can't be healthy to
put that much smoke into your lungs.

~~~
sb057
Weaker lungs is a small price to pay for not being blind and/or insane

~~~
MikeHolman
I didn't know marijuana was a cure for blindness or psychosis (if anything I
thought it was an aggravator of the latter).

~~~
ghshephard
very short term effectiveness for treating Glaucoma:
[http://www.aao.org/salud-ocular/consejos/medical-
marijuana-g...](http://www.aao.org/salud-ocular/consejos/medical-marijuana-
glaucoma-treament)

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

~~~
eunoia
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.

~~~
jnhuynh
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-...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/green-bits-launches-point-of-
sale-service-for-cannabis-shops/) [3]:[https://jobs.lever.co/greenbits?lever-
via=_335J-YDmj](https://jobs.lever.co/greenbits?lever-via=_335J-YDmj)

~~~
scruple
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
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.

------
godzillabrennus
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
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.

~~~
colemickens
Really? This? Again? There's a reason tech companies don't drug test and I'd
argue that flies in the face of the tired stereotype you're offering up.

edit: It's funny to watch HN's reactions to anything related to cannabis.
You'd think people here watched Reefer Madness and haven't bothered to inform
themselves about any actual facts or know any actual consumers of cannabis
since then.

The implication that someone smoking pot in the evening would affect their
ability to type a very basic mathematical expression the next day is
absolutely farcical.

~~~
tacos
I personally told these numbskulls multiple times that width = x2 - x1 PLUS
one. Maybe it was the weed, maybe they just sucked at coding, maybe you didn't
notice that FAXes were blurry in Windows for 20 years either.

The real problem at late 90s Microsoft was cocaine. Didn't see much of that
among the engineers though.

------
pboutros
Explains what was going on when they bought LinkedIn.

/s

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

------
vegabook
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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Ads delivered to your computer by Windows? Check.

I'd rather have the old Microsoft back. :/

~~~
vegabook
fair enough. But let's compare them to the competitors, Facebook, Google,
Apple. Only the last can legitimately be said not to pollute your life with
more ads than Microsoft. MS is benign by comparison with the first two.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I think it's just as legitimate to compare Microsoft's product to _the
previous version of itself_ as it is to compare it to what's offered by other
companies. And that comparison doesn't make Microsoft look benign.

------
mwsherman
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.

------
pritam2020
So we will have a new metric like the ballmer peak?

~~~
bertil
You are not the only one asking.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/3nhybk/ballmer_peak_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/3nhybk/ballmer_peak_substitute_trees_n_for_alcohol/)

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.

------
Drakim
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.

~~~
joefkelley
Yes, it's still very much illegal federally. It's still a Schedule I
controlled substance. The federal banking system / IRS refuses to interact
with marijuana businesses, the postal service won't mail ads for it, the DEA
continues to raid growers, etc, etc.

Edit: as others have pointed out, I was incorrect in lumping in the IRS with
the rest of the federal banking system. The IRS does indeed accept money from
marijuana businesses. There are other parts of the federal banking system that
are not so "accepting", for instance:
[http://www.denverpost.com/2016/01/05/judge-tosses-denver-
mar...](http://www.denverpost.com/2016/01/05/judge-tosses-denver-marijuana-
credit-unions-suit-for-federal-approval/)

~~~
blackguardx
The IRS explicitly states that you need to declare bribes and income from
illegal activities [1]

"Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from
dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21,
or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment
activity."

[1]
[https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch12.html](https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch12.html)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
That's just hilarious! Are you saying drug dealers actually report their
income and pay taxes off it?

~~~
shimon
Of course not. This is just a clarification about another point of law that a
typical drug dealer violates, which gives law enforcement yet another angle.

In some cases proving tax evasion is easier than proving other crimes. This is
what got Al Capone -- because the crime was perpetrated through his
organization and not by him directly, it would have been difficult to hold him
directly responsible for the crimes. However, once his ledger was discovered
it was straightforward to prove that he received significant income without
making the required income tax payments.

------
anonbanker
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)

------
MikeHolman
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.

------
drawkbox
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.

------
romanovcode
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.

------
bashmohandes
Gives a whole new meaning to Cloud Computing.

------
dreamdu5t
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.

------
musgrove
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.

------
donw
Pretty sure that distinction goes to Taco Bell...

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

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

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

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

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

------
planetmcd
Maybe that is why the forced the latest update?

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

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

------
Roboprog
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???

