French Post Office Goes High Tech
The French Post Office’s (La Poste) premium overnight parcel service, Chronopost, competes with UPS, DHL, TNT, Fed Ex, etc. for the coveted high-volume business user. Like their competition (which La Poste has only recently discovered from behind the 20-meter thick bubble wrap security of their statute of an official French gov’t monopoly), they offer their own software to automate labeling, tracking, and expediting of packages. This is good.
A friend of mine, who runs a hugely successful ecommerce site, learned the rest of the story, however, when he decided to offer Chronopost delivery as an option to his clientele. He asked La Poste for the special software, so that he could install it on the dedicated computer that already manages the 600-1000 packages that he sends out every day. La Poste replies that that wasn’t a good idea because their special software only functions with Windoze 98.
Ah, oui, of course.
To their credit, they made him an offer that was hard to resist: they would come to his warehouse and install, at their expense, a separate computer of their own, running W98 and their software.
Wow! Who says the French aren’t into customer service!
A few of us have been spending idle moments the last few days trying to figure out how much it costs La Poste to troll Ebay and bankruptcy auctions, buying up every 32M RAM / 250M hard drive CPU they can get their hands on in order to obtain whatever W98 licenses are still out there. Probably a bazillion gazillion times more than it would cost them to simply rewrite the application for 21st century users.
