Microsoft To Open Retail Stores

chaz373 writes "CNET reports that Microsoft is going retail. In the 'Beyond Binary' blog Ina Fried reports, 'After years of brushing off the notion, Microsoft said on Thursday that it will open up its own line of retail stores. Without detailing the plans, Microsoft said it has hired David Porter, a 25-year Wal-Mart veteran, to lead the effort. Sources say that Porter's mission will be to develop the company's retail plans and that the effort is likely to start small with just a few locations.'"

Comments

Microsoft has opened retail stores before

[Anonymous Coward]

Summary is misleading. Microsoft has tried retail before. (before apple and dell, even.)

Re:Microsoft has opened retail stores before

[UnknowingFool]

That wasn't really a store. It was more of a really one demonstration showroom and it has been closed.

Re:Microsoft has opened retail stores before

[UnknowingFool]

While you could buy Microsoft software there, almost half of the inventory at the microsoftSF store was "microsoftSF" items. Most of the 8,500 sq ft was dedicated to "an interactive environment" to display Microsoft's vision of software.

Pictures

[68kmac]

Retail Experience Center

I especially like the photo with the shopping cart ...

Re:Following Apple

[Theovon]

You can't spot a personality from across a room

Well, maybe if you're autistic. SOME of us computer geeks are actually quite good at reading subtle cues that people give off in their posture, mannerisms, choice of clothing&makeup, etc., etc., etc. Can you rely on it 100%? Certainly not. People will surprise you. But there's an absolutely astounding amount you can learn about a person just from casual observation. And for many of us, the intuitions are handed to us on a platter, rather than having to reason it out by consciously noticing the underlying clues.

To put it in technical terms, there's a high noise to signal ratio. You can get at the signal, but you need really sophisticated filters, and it's a knowledge-intensive abductive inference process that involves a significant amount of hypothesis generation and testing. How conscious or automatic and effective it is depends on practice, natural talent, empathy, and the willingness to actually pay attention.

Metreon

[PeanutButterBreath]

The Metreon was never much of a mall. I'm not even sure it was meant to be given its proximity to Market Street, the real mall at the base of Powell, Union Square etc. Other than the Playstation store, there was really no reason to go there unless you were on your way to the Cinema upstairs.

It seemed more like a mini-expo center -- a place to put product in front of people who were looking to kill time before their movie started.

Re:Wow.

[Corporate Troll]

It's not that hard, really... There are a few things you need to know and unless you really want to go deep down in details the following general rules work:

• Install the machine, with Administrator install all required applications. Test them, they should work.
• Now create the Limited User and log in with that user. Run all the applications you have installed and note which fail. That's not that many usually...
• For those application, locate their installed folder. Add the "Users" group to the ACL and give it "full control". The WTF here is that on Windows Home this is hard and on Windows Pro this is easy. Windows Home lacks the graphical interface to do it. You have to use "cacls.exe", which is a command line tool. That said, I head there is a patch which restores the graphical ACL editor. You evidently need to log in as Admin to make these ACL changes
• Retest the applications, some will now work.
• The remaining applications that don't work most likely will try to write to a part of HKLM in the registry. As Administrator, go to the registry key associated with the application (Typicallyy HKLM\Software\Company\Product). Now change the ACL of that "folder" to "Full Control" for the "Users" group.
• Retest... With that 99% of the applications work, and those that don't really are badly behaved and I'd suggest finding an alternative.

Now do realise the following: this essentially allows normal users to hose those badly behaved applications, but I suggest that such a thing is acceptable. They will, however, not be able to hose the system itself, which is the goal.

Up until now, one one application didn't want to work with the above technique. It was -of course- a game and I think it was the copy protection doing some funky stuff.

Now, I'd still suggest hiding Internet Explorer and provide Firefox instead. I don't know if it's needed, though.

Re:Wow.

[je ne sais quoi]

Guess what. NOTHING worked. Flash/Shockwave completely broken.

Well, I'm not sure what you were doing, what distro you were using or what, but Adobe has ben one of the few mainstream proprietary companies who has actually been porting their software to linux. For instance, the native 64 bit version of flash runs only on linux, not mac os x or windows. I'm going to give you some credit and assume that you're not a complete idiot and suggest that your distro. was being overzealous and installing a "free as in speech" flash version and that your browser was using that instead of Adobe's. That's kind of irritating, but it's certainly not insurmountable, e.g., I watch hulu and youtube all the time on my machine, works great.