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Celebrate Your Next Birthday At the Microsoft Store
theodp writes "Chuck E. Cheese, meet Bill H. Gates. A leaked PowerPoint posted at Gizmodo provides a glimpse of what Microsoft's retail shops may look like, noting that you'll even be able to pay to celebrate your birthday there. Some of the stores that were profiled for ideas were Nike, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and AT&T. Microsoft's take on the Genius Bar is the Answers Bar (aka Guru Bar, Windows Bar)."
I think Microsoft's new campaign of "personalization" is worthwhile, especially as a way to counter the "hipness" of Apple. With Apple you get popularity, but there's no uniqueness. Microsoft gave up on popularity, hipness after the failed Bill Gates/Seinfeld "quirky" commercials. Uniqueness and customization is a good strategy, I think. The "I'm a PC" commercials pushed it and the stores, as per the article, are making it a big focus.
I don't really have any need to buy Microsoft products, but it's certainly interesting. It's new at least, and I think it has a shot at succeeding. Plus, having real people to talk to is a step towards making it easier to use a valid, purchased product than a pirated product, which is step 1 in fighting piracy (the real way).
Their Apple envy will be the death of this store idea. One of the huge differences between MS and Apple is that peole don't use MS products because they love them, they use them because they feel they have no choice . Apple users strive to own Apples, while MS users largely resent MS.
Caveat Utilitor
While Sony isn't very popular on slashdot for obvious reasons, they have some kind of rock solid customer base who keeps buying/upgrading their products.
Used (in fact, restored) a Sony Vaio high end laptop for 2 days, I ended up telling its owner "This thing tries to be Apple but the operating system (Windows) kills the experience". I mean they are really unique in terms of EFI etc.
MS is a general operating system vendor. There is no "Vista Air" to show there.
I can tell what they should stock. Input Devices, lots and lots of them, all models and they should allow people to try them physically.
Also if they will show laptops (which will make excluded partners mad), a tip from me: Use your own products (update services) to make them turn on 08 AM, install all updates, shut down or sleep until shop opens. All without "status windows" which you love. Staring at 20 laptops having that yellow "critical updates available" is really absurd. Hope some computer shops read this. Add "Wireless signal low" and you have complete "don't buy me, I will really fsck up your life" product display.
They don't even think about a shop edition of Windows right? A basic CD could do all the things I said above. While I don't have that MSCE thing, I can do it myself.
What's sad about Microsoft is that they've long stopped innovating... if they ever did.
The Microsoft Store is a ripoff of the Apple Store.
The Zune is a ripoff of the iPod (or a turd... I'm not sure).
Bing and Live before is a ripoff of Google.
They don't create anything any more. They just copy others and wonder why it doesn't work. (Indeed copying others and doing enough versions seemed to work for them. It just doesn't work any longer.)
Even Windows is a ripoff of Windows, and since XP that's been on a downward trend as more apps more to the web. They killed off Windows as a gaming platform with their idiot decision to restrict DirectX10 to Vista. Vista. Vista. Vista....
(Bill Gates wakes up in a cold sweat. "Oh Melissa I've had the most horrible dream...")
Dear God in heaven, have these guys *ever* had an original thought? I mean an original though that was good, of course.
Apple pulls it off because they've got flash, Nike pulls it off because they've got the same thing Apple has.
Flash helps, but I don't think that's the main reason why it works for Apple.
Apple can pull it off because:
They sell hardware. Mac Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook, iPod/iPhone...
People walk in, try all the models, and if they buy something they know exactly what they're getting.
Microsoft sells^Wlicenses software.
What the customer demos at the store isn't what they take home with them. That little box doesn't contain the obscenely powerful gaming rig that the customer played with. The only two things in the store that will perform exactly as displayed would be MS's two main hardware products: Zune and Xbox.
At the time, analysts pooh-poohed the idea of Apple's retail stores originally, too. The retail space was glutted with computers, Apple already had a relationship with CompUSA which was best described as "passive-aggressive," and Gateway's retail concept was defecating the bed. Opening a retail store was the silliest thing they could have done, except it worked for them. They weren't just marketing hardware and software, what they were doing was cashing in on the brand's exclusivity, by creating a boutique space where people could interact with the hardware and ask questions about it.
The problem with Microsoft's concept is that they don't have the same culture to sell. Apple has a niche (albeit a very deep niche) market which supports the notion of exclusiveness (which anyone can conveniently buy into). Microsoft doesn't have that kind of exclusiveness (unless you're talking about excluding people who are using previous versions of their OS on older hardware). What Microsoft will instead find they're selling is ubiquity, and not even a nice sort of ubiquity either. It's more of a fetid, horrid inevitability, not so much like death as spending the holiday with in-laws.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Not long ago a story ran describing a long term debt offering by MS. The story was noteworthy because it stated MS had never offered long term debt instruments. Old school investment theory, as I remember it, would characterize an MS offering of long term debt instruments as one sign of a mature company. It may be the MS brain trust sees it's revenue flattening out and wants to lock in some long term money. Moving into bricks and mortar is another story, although if they see their revenue base flattening or receding like a middle aged hair line then maybe their looking to generate new revenue from a new venue. The question arises as to the likelihood of their offering their own boxes. I'm pretty sure the margin on PC stuff is as thin as it gets but they must have a strategy in hand. Some time ago Bill Gates rather infamously prophesied that, about now, PC hardware would be free with the OS and software being the only costs. Whatever the present state of information suggests I'd expect some good old extend, embrace and extinguish action.
ideopath @ play
What problem is MS trying to solve? The lack of coolness. As the old IBM showed so well, there is no profit to being cool on the back end. Just efficient. Unlike Apple, any MS store will compete with the other retail outlets. The best thing to have such stores will be xBox items and the like, which will compete with other stores. Perhaps they will have computers there as well, but how to choose the makes and models. Seems like if they have Compaq and HP, then everyone else will file a suite.
Honestly, it seems like it wold be better to offer any retailer the ability to build a MS support center in existing retail space. Like the current I'm a PC commercials, the entire venture seems to be desperate money spent for no apparent reason. Make the OS work. Lower prices. Get out the next xBox. This is what the people wnat.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"while MS users largely resent MS" Where the hell did you get this idea?
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If they did that, I'd ask them to install any version of Windows on the same PC to compare. Just to see how many drivers they'd have to install manually.
Funny, how you clearly pointed out that, as nearly all of the time with such errors, it's a driver problem. And even more fitting, that it's one from ATi. Known for their notoriously bad drivers in all of the game development scene, including Carmack.
Yet if someone says that Linux support suffers because of the hardware, he is apologetic. How fitfully ironic.
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
Well, I don't think that the average Windows user actually feels like an oppressed indentured servant, like he's portrayed around these parts.
I think for most people it's just utilitarian. It's what came with the computer, it's what works, now let me on teh intarwebs already.
Basically it's not as much about the presence of a negative conotation about MS, it's more like just the absence of a positive one. Having a Windows computer or hanging around a Windows store, just doesn't carry the same illusion of somehow being hip and cool. It's just a tool to an end.
Sorta like how nobody would hang around the Bosch power tools section of Home Depot, nor carry around an electric drill to look cool.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, Windows has market share going for them - but what else? If I could run everything I wanted to run on OSX (and on a machine that I could actually afford), I'd switch right away...
Sure, Linux netbooks were taken off the shelves in lieu of Windows-based machines - but not because the Windows experience is so great, but rather because the Linux experience was so awful. Sure, most of that's the hardware vendors' fault for not setting up their Linux distributions properly (missing drivers, etc. etc.), but all the average consumer knows is that the Windows version of the same laptop works out of the box...
But working out of the box isn't enough - that's just a prerequisite. A good operating system needs to do a lot more...
No, I'm pretty sure he'd do it simply because it'd be funny.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
It makes no difference at all to the customer if it's a driver problem, an app problem or a kernel programmer had a bad day.
A successful antitrust suit is a pretty good indication that people are not using a company's product though choice.
After the break-up of the Standard Oil trust, customers went right on buying from Rockefeller's regional operating companies.
He prospered. They prospered. The small independents faded out of the picture.
The fact that government intervention failed to have any impact on Standard Oil (or AT&T, or Microsoft) does not prove that they were not coercive monopolies. Only that government intervention was ineffective.