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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Aloha has the advantage of not being "cloud-hosted". You know, the ones where you stand in line at checkout waiting while the terminal talks to some overloaded server far away? That's modern "cloud" point of sale. Aloha has a little box under the manager's desk running the terminals.

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I work on a POS system at "a big software company" and a primary selling point is that your transactions flow up from the POS, to an optional in-store server, to the cloud, and if any point experiences a temporary failure (POS -> in-store or in-store -> cloud) it will simply batch-upload at the next opportunity, seamlessly, with no impact on the cashier's experience.

Founder of one of those cloud-hosted POS https://www.waiterio.com Yes having no internet or slow internet with a cloud hosted POS is big trouble.

I foresee the cycle of innovation will be: 1) offline (PAST) 2) cloud-hosted (PRESENT) 3) cloud hosted but with full offline support (FUTURE) This way we'll have the best of both worlds.

What's good about cloud hosted POS you ask? Well they do update easily. So you are not stuck with the same system with 90s UIs.

Also by upgrading faster and being connected to the internet the POS is able to interface with external systems. Currently 99% of restaurants use a separate tablet for each online delivery service (deliveroo justeat foodpanda...).

> What's good about cloud hosted POS you ask? Well they do update easily.

This doesn't require "cloud" at all, just network connectivity. Software auto-updaters are no more complicated than zero-downtime cloud deployments. Especially in fully controlled environments where issues of users randomly switching off autoupdates or blocking Internet connectivity are probably nearly non-existent.

I'd argue that the software is more resilient if it runs locally. One can argue that cloud can be updated "in realtime" but live code updates had existed since forever (at least since eighties, with Erlang/OTP), and running locally makes things robust against network outages (or degradation) - which is probably way more frequent issue than getting the latest updates immediately.

Nobody wants to update a POS system "in realtime" - meaning while someone is actively using it and processing transactions. Just like nobody wants prices of items to change mid-transaction. It is impossible to explain these kinds of events to customers (sorry, but five of your eight Cokes are 20 cents more because we happened to be too slow to scan them and a price change came in between). In countries employing strict fiscal rules governing electronic cash registers - which are more and more on a global scale - stuff like that may even be illegal to do.

This is one of the reasons why that entire "cloud" SaaS thing is a bad fit for PoS systems to start with. It doesn't stop cloud apologetes to still develop and market such systems and customers who drank the cloud kool-aid to buy them, but what people actually want in that business when push comes to shove is a locally-installed system that is seamlessly offline-capable in all its core features, can send transactions out and receive new master data in real-time while network connectivity is available and can be updated easily and ideally via a centrally controllable and plannable process. And that have actually been bog-standard features for PoS systems for at least a decade or two, long before all that "push everything into the cloud" hype started.

Often the cloud sell is less a sale of “the cloud” and more modern development and configuration practices such as being able to do a reliable auto update. I’ve had a lot of vendors sell hosted solutions with the premise that since they will deploy an update regardless of the customers input it prevents the risk adverse business side from preventing updates.

It does provide resilience but it also increases the complexity which may not be the right trade off in some instances.

>What's good about cloud hosted POS you ask? Well they do update easily. So you are not stuck with the same system with 90s UIs.

How are constant UI changes a good thing?

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