Microsoft to open 11 new retail stores by summer Microsoft has announced that it will open six new retail stores in North America by summer 2013, in addition to five locations that were previously announced in December. To be precise, only a few of the new stores represent brand-new markets for Microsoft. Several are permanent replacements for earlier holiday pop-up stores, …
If the Mall Of America store is anything to go by, they will be used like most Microsoft stores, kids playing with the Kinnect, a few old people who don't know better and think Windows is all there is, and people going in to get a look at the things they will be buying later off Amazon.
Ballmer is the king of the "Me too" school. Soon more of his sad tablet nobody wants, for sale in his fake Apple Stores. Couldn't they even try for their own look? How hard is that?
If I was still a Microsoftie, I'd be annoyed. Microsoft needs to get it together and start being MICROSOFT again instead of a half baked erzotz Apple
In my 20 years or so of owning a PC I have never considered buying the complete thing in a store. Various peripherals and a few odds and ends but that's about it.
However, stores are useful for confirming whether or not the evaluatiions that we commonly read are valid or not.
Also, whether or not someone buys a MS tablet in a store or from Amazon still means a sale for Ballmer.... He doesn't care how the material is shifted just so long as it moves.
Apple's store layout originates from European designer clothes boutiques (for which Apple have a cheek patenting). It worked for one designer brand and others followed suit. Apple remarkably made computers fashionable. As pointed out here already, Ballmer and the 'Microsoft' name are going to struggle being trendy. They would't have been worse off buying and resurrecting the Apricot and Atari names.
The move to a bricks and mortar strategy will add lots of costs to their bottom line that hitherto Microsoft never had to think about. Trying to out-Apple Apple is not going to work either as they are in catch-up mode. And, unlike Apple, they still have their OEM chain to placate somehow.
With Intel pulling out of the motherboard market it is clear that the times they are a changing.
Time will tell but I think that the shareholders will be looking hard at the break-up options if U$oft continue to slide. I hedged my bets when I bough shares in Arm a few years ago...
Agreed. Microsoft, at this point, are primarily a business software supplier, who dabble in consumer hardware. Their consumer OS "business" is only due to contracts they have to supply the default OS on hardware sold by others. People buy Microsoft software because they have to, not because they want to.
They will never have the "wow" factor of Apple, because the Microsoft brand carries too much baggage. Sure, people will buy Surface, but when they find out it's inferior to the iPad (which has a 3 year head start), their friends will go back to buying Apple and Surface will go the way of Kin and Zune.
I feel rather sorry for Microsoft, because they just don't "get it"...instead of following the crowd, they should try delivering what should, by now, be the logical fruit of their years of experience: a fast, cheap, reliable OS that rejects malware like an umbrella sheds rain. But I fear internal politics and Ballmer's non technical leadership has doomed them...
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