An accounting and POS (Point of Sale) publisher we deal with (Vigilant) had (still has) a very fine DOS product, but accepted the innevitable and started the migration to Windows. Problem was, they couldn't get the stability and data integrity they felt was required, and Windows kept changing, so it took them 8 years to get the Windows version out the door. It's a super fine Windows app, but -

In the mean time, their clients were growing. Their DOS version had multi-store poling, just like the big guys used - but - their customers weren't big guys and didn't understand what to do when the nightly poling didn't go, so the accounting would get screwed up on a regular basis - so -
  • Marketing to Programming: "what can we do to make this poling more reliable?"
  • Programming to Marketing: "Nothing - not with DOS, but we could run the DOS version under Linux and use terminal emulation at the stores over a data link."
  • Marketing to Programming: "OK, do that and we'll try it"

  • Marketing to Customer: "We have this neat way of avoiding poling problems! Just run multiple DOS sessions on a central computer over a data link and everything's up to date all the time".
  • Customer to Marketing: "Looks great - but what happens when the data link goes down. Our store will be out of business."
  • Marketing to Customer: "Would that happen?"

  • Marketing to Programming: "how do we fix this data link problem?"
  • Programming to Marketing: "Nothing - but we could put the program back in the stores so they could run on local data if the link were down, but the local data will probably be way obsolete, so there would be synchronization problems."
  • Marketing to Programming: "Back where we were. What can we do".
  • Programming to Marketing: "Nothing - with DOS - but if the software was ported to Linux we could do synchronization in the background".
  • Marketing to Programming: "That seems awful complicated - so, when is the Windows version going to be done so we can get away from this poling thing?"
  • Programming to Marketing: "Windows will use poling. It isn't able to do anything more complex".
  • Marketing to Universe: "AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!"
Solution. The Windows version is finally out, but the Linux Real Time Multistore version with automatic local failover and background synchronization is now the company's flagship product.