Microsoft Planning 75 New Retail Stores to Take on Apple

[Blu Reel]

By that logic arent a lot of shops Apple stores, since places like PC World and many electronic retailers sell Macs.

Ummm...yes. That is true...nowadays...and with respect to selling product. But when Apple opened it's first retail store, Apple computers were not sold by most electronic retailers. And the shopping experience for buying an Apple product at that those places was not about selling the Apple experience as it is now at the Apple retail stores.

The Apple retail store was a strategic decision to help bring Apple back from the brink of shutting down. By Microsoft following Apple's lead in the retail store experience, can we infer that Microsoft is facing a similar situation?

 

[Will do good]

What if you bring up a computer to this Answer Desk and the people there look at the computer and find it's a hardware and not a software fault. Would the Answer Desk staff still look at the computer or just pass the buck and tell you to do to the hardware manufacturer to get the issue fixed?

That's something I always wanted to know. Would MS deal with hardware issues or just pass the buck to someone else?

Good question. Apple owns the hardware and software so they will fix what they can. What would MS do

 

[brunnecc]

Hardware...

If MS doesn't get into the hardware game, and somehow make it as profitable as Apple's is, then I don't see the point in opening ANY additional MS Retail locations...

-Chris
FOM

 

[ericinboston]

HAHAHAHAHA, MS Fail #120,682

yet somehow they own 90%+ of the personal computer market share...and have for 20+ years. Not to mention they make billions in the business sector (what does Apple make in the business sector (insert cricket sounds)).

MS hasn't been super innovative the past 5+ years...everyone agrees on that...but they still do a lot of things right.

 

[kiljoy616]

I can see it now Ctrl + Alt + Del will be the main fix for Genius Bar.

Oh I see here that your DLL is missing again.

 

[Pink∆Floyd]

They should invest that money into something useful or for improvements, not copying Apple

 

[hegor]

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

This is not news. Apple Stores make sense as there weren't very many places one could buy and experience Apple products, but MS stuff is everywhere.

I would be a worried if I owned MS stock.

 

[kiljoy616]

Wyoming?

What did you expect downtown Glass Globe NY City

 

[Amory]

Not sure if anyone posted this yet...

 

[solz]

show of hands, who actually believes themselves when they say this is a "copy" of an apple store.. cuz thats pretty ridiculous to me lol

 

[Will do good]

Everytime Ive had to get to an Apple store, was to actually purchase something, or get a faulty product looked at. Ive had to squeeze through a huge crowd of what Id say were

80% people browsing Facebook on the Macs
10% people returning faulty products
5% people filming themselves at the Apple Store
5% people buying things


If only 5% of the people are buying things as you claim, I wonder how Apple retail store have the highest dollar sale per sq.ft than any retail business.

 

[winston1236]

haha they should change their name to microcopy, seriously what is the point of running your own store when every electronics store sells your product + you dont even make a computer just a flawed operating system

 

[Laird Knox]

theres so much microsoft bashing going on its ridiculous lol, its funny to see how apple people think their supperior in every way shape and form. Who complains that grocery stores copy each other? or target copies walmart or vice versa.. its a store model that works, why wouldnt microsoft copy it.. with that said, its funny to find everyone missing the obvious.

I think it is more an issue of ignorance than one of superiority. Happens no matter what platform you use.

Also people just aren't logical in these matters. David Pogue wrote a great piece on it for Scientific American.

So when the Apple iPad debuted last year, I tried a crazy experiment: I wrote two reviews in the New York Times in a single column, taking opposite positions. One was for the fanboys—all positive. One was for the haters—all negative. Surely, I thought, this would satisfy everyone.

Incredibly, though, the stunt pleased nobody. The anti-Apple bloggers wrote about my “love letter” to the iPad; the fanboy bloggers foamed at the mouth about the “hatchet job” I’d written. Each side ignored half of the review!

- link

 

[Aviboy97]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Microsoft is trying to open a Colorado store in Wyoming..

Maybe they should use Google maps instead of Bing maps.

I noticed that too. I was wondering why there was a store in Wyoming...

 

[entropys]

Apple opened its stores because it had no retail presence otherwise. Most people here have made the observation that Microsoft products are everywhere, so why bother?

But what about Microsokia products? WM7 hasn't really rocked the world yet has it?

Nokia has very little presence in the US. This could be about setting the scene for a real big ad campaign and retail push for Nokia products running windows mobile7.

 

[kiljoy616]

yet somehow they own 90%+ of the personal computer market share...and have for 20+ years. Not to mention they make billions in the business sector (what does Apple make in the business sector (insert cricket sounds)).

MS hasn't been super innovative the past 5+ years...everyone agrees on that...but they still do a lot of things right.

MS has never been innovative and I have use PC for that long. What MS has had is a cheap product that anyone can use mostly at companies, this is why their OS still sucks but it does what companies need. And like most sheep what you see at work you will normally buy for home. As someone who use to do IT support and made a good living from it the 90's it was a dream knowing their crapware was always there to keep me in a job. Oh dell your my hero also.

Like Android if all you do is Software that has everything and then some which is also cheap next to the competition then its a no brainer. The only reason Linux never really made it to the desktop like it should have is because it still sucks for users. Also gaming was a big letdown for Apple and Linux and lets not kid our selves gaming sells a lot of pc's.

 

[winston1236]

yet somehow they own 90%+ of the personal computer market share...and have for 20+ years. Not to mention they make billions in the business sector (what does Apple make in the business sector (insert cricket sounds)).

MS hasn't been super innovative the past 5+ years...everyone agrees on that...but they still do a lot of things right.

Microsoft is what people who like more of the same buy, they are the people scared of new technology and they hurl insults at those whose lives are happier because they haven't seen a blue screen in almost a decade

 

[carmenodie]

Are you seriously?
This is nothing but a ploy to increase their sluggish stock price. Really folks, why the hell would you go into a MS store when you can head over to Tiger direct? LOL!
Apple is Bergdorf Goodman and MS is 7-11.

 

[TennisandMusic]

Microsoft is what people who like more of the same buy, they are the people scared of new technology and they hurl insults at those whose lives are happier because they haven't seen a blue screen in almost a decade

I can guarantee you plenty of Windows users are in that same boat. And also, Macs still get Kernel panics.

This thread makes me embarrassed to be an Apple user.

 

[kiljoy616]

I noticed that too. I was wondering why there was a store in Wyoming...

Cowboys need all the help they can get.

 

[Aviboy97]

show of hands, who actually believes themselves when they say this is a "copy" of an apple store.. cuz thats pretty ridiculous to me lol
QUOTE]

This is from the Microsoft Store web site.. Looks pretty similar to me

 

[kiljoy616]

I can guarantee you plenty of Windows users are in that same boat. And also, Macs still get Kernel panics.

This thread makes me embarrassed to be an Apple user.

Kernel Panic right I have not seen that in 5 years. What have you been doing to your Mac to get that. I have gotten DLL crashes just last week after installing a game, now that is lame.

 

[ggbrown]

Needs to be so much more than 'a store'

I bought something at the local Apple Store today. It's not just having a store presence that makes Apple successful, it's the service that is outstanding.

New this time I went in was an iPad that had an option to basically 'summon' an employee. It tells you where you are in the queue, and wherever you are in the store, an employee appears by your side to help you.

Add to that getting your product and checking out within 90 seconds....it's painless. Never an 'up-sell' either (maybe I just convey i know what I want).

Of anywhere I shop, nothing compares to the purchase experience at an Apple Store (IMHO).

 

[kiljoy616]

Microsoft is what people who like more of the same buy, they are the people scared of new technology and they hurl insults at those whose lives are happier because they haven't seen a blue screen in almost a decade

The same people that will buy some crapware tablet just because they don't want to buy an ipad will be going there, I for one am all for MS wasting money nothing bad about that. I figure their biggest thing will be Xbox and gaming which is about the only real thing they can show off. Maybe some MS phones but its not really their hardware.

 

[ericinboston]

They should invest that money into something useful or for improvements, not copying Apple

Who said they were copying Apple? And since when did Apple first create the Retail store? 1908? Ever hear of Sears? What about CompUSA or Bestbuy or Circuit City or Gap? Apple Stores are nice stores...I like them...very clean and tidy and rarely a broken unit in the store. But plenty of other retail stores have similar warm-and-fuzziness that Apple does. Remember, Apple sells Apple. So in the retail world you can't compare Apple Stores to Best Buy, for example...you should compare them to Bose (my oh my how Apple is like Bose...talk about copying!) or Gap.

I think MS should be a little more innovative but let's face it...they DO NOT SELL HARDWARE. They are in the software business. It is a 100% completely different business model than the Apple business model...in every single aspect. Apple sells Apple hardware with Apple OSes with Apple apps with Apple keyboard with Apple mice and Apple monitors...etc. Apple controls the whole thing...which is fine. MS provides quite a few software titles you can run on your PC (or Mac). That's it.

My personal ideas for MS software improvements would be:

Windows versions that support hardware/protocol specs faster...such as USB3.0...or truly take advantage of multi-core CPUs for consumer OSes.

Office that is much simpler...make a switch somewhere in Settings to go to Light mode or Power User mode. I hate O2007 and O2010. O2003 was great.

More built-in and quality apps embedded into Windows. The problem is that they will get sued again like in 1999 with the whole IE thing. So I think MS is afraid to come up with an iLife kinda free tool included with Windows. I'd like to see a great video editor and photo organizer and maybe an MS Works thing for free.



Think about if Apple only made iLife and OSX...what would it improve every few years? Kinda tough.