Hey, remember when Macs were cool and PCs were stodgy wannabes? On Thursday, Microsoft announced a partnership with Kind, a Los Angeles startup that serves the growing legal marijuana industry; Microsoft will include Kind's software to track marijuana from "seed to sale" in its Azure cloud computing offerings to state and local governments. Kind's program will be one of eight offerings in Azure Government, and the only one related to weed. This is the "boring part of the pot world," The New York Times notes, but even Microsoft's toehold into the business side breaks "the corporate taboo on pot."
A big reason Microsoft is going where no big company has (publicly) gone before is that legal marijuana sales are big and growing fast. This fall, five states — notably, California — will vote on whether to join Washington, Colorado, and Oregon in legalizing pot for recreational use. "We do think there will be significant growth," said Kimberly Nelson, Microsoft's executive director of state and local government solutions. "As the industry is regulated, there will be more transactions, and we believe there will be more sophisticated requirements and tools down the road."
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