The funny thing is, it's actually exactly the other way around. The usual complaint about Win8 (and Windows RT) is that it doesn't look like Windows. However, "underneath" it's exactly Windows, aside from running on ARM (and you may be too young to remember, but the NT family - which includes Win7 and Win8 - has always come on multiple architectures; with NT6.2 they dropped Itanium and picked up ARM). Remove the restriction to Microsoft-signed binaries on the desktop, and you have a decent Windows machine which simply requires that native apps be recompiled first (.NET apps run on-modified, and there's even some hacked-up support for Java and Python).
Actually, leaving aside the built-in apps (of which the only really performance-sensitive one is IE), it's actually pretty easy to enable running traditional Windows apps on Windows RT. The "jailbreak" script is public and dead easy to use..NET apps will run un-modified. Native ones need to be recompiled, but there's already quite a few which have been (including a number of games, which will definitely benefit from improved performance). Alternatively, there's also an x86 dynamic recompilation layer which allows running native apps unmodified (handy since most Windows apps are closed source and thus can't be easily recompiled) although the performance is of course not great (which means that a faster CPU will help a lot there too).
Because Win8 (and WRT) both use the same API (WinRT) and an app published for one is either automatically available for the other, or requires only a trivial recompile, and because while Win8 may be *relatively* unpopular, it's actually very widely installed. Write a Win8 app, put it on the store, sell it to people who have Win8 (and, conveniently enough with no extra work on your part, also to the people who have Windows RT).
For what it's worth, you actually can develop in.NET for Windows RT - either through official channels (the Windows Store supports all.NET languages, though you have to use XAML, HTML5, or DirectX for graphics, not WinForms or console or anything traditional like that...) or through development for "jailbroken" tablets (once the restriction to Microsoft-signed binaries on the desktop is gone, Windows RT will very happily run.NET 4.0 or later code, provided it was compiled for "AnyCPU" as is the default in Visual Studio).
The OS also comes with csc.exe (the C# compiler) and there's a.NET IDE which has been ported to run on the OS, so you can even develop code on Surface RT. Not saying you *should*, necessarily - the Touch Cover is in fact usable for coding, but I'd want at least a Type Cover before doing serious work - but you can.
One of the things that's always bugged me about Java generics: array allocation. The following code works in C#. It does not work in Java:
class bar<t> {
t[] baz;
public bar() {
baz = new t[10];
}
}
To make something like that work in Java (which I've had to do before), prepare to get your hands dirty with Reflection or to be doing a lot of explicit casts. It's really annoying.
Distint signed and unsigned variants of all integer types (handy for interop with native code, and occasionally for other things), "using" blocks (forces an object to be cleaned up when it goes out of scope, instead of whenever the garbage collector gets around to noticing that it's out of scope), destructors (no, Java finalize() does *not* count), lambdas (and delegates in general; the closest thing Java has to a simple function pointer is ridiculously verbose), LINQ or anything like it, better generics that let you do things like allocating an array of the generic type without absurd reflection hacks...
Comments aren't good enough? If some code is going to throw exceptions on a ragular basis and these exceptions aren't documented, that's not code I want to be using.
On the flip side, it pisses me off to need to write try-ignore wrappers around code that I know will never throw the exception in question.
As a matter of fact, it does. I mean, strictly speaking it's at \\.\C:\Windows\SUA\dev\null, but according to bash: $ ls -l/dev/null crw-rw-rw- 1 +SYSTEM 0 48, 0 Dec 5 2012/dev/null $ uname -a Interix Jayne 6.2 10.0.7063.0 authenticamd AMD64_Family_21_Model_2_Stepping_0 $ echo $SUA_ROOT /dev/fs/C/Windows/SUA/
Java is actually not "entirely OOP based" although it's close enough for most purposes. Example:
17.ToString() works in C#. It (or the eqivalent 17.toString()) does not work in Java.
In.NET, everything is an object. "int" is another name for Int32, which is a struct (stack-allocated, value-passed object) that inherits from Object and implements a number of interfaces (IComparable, etc.).
Sony is better on the subject of DRM? Sony, the company that retroactively removed features from their last console via mandatory update? Sony, the company that sued hackers who managed to re-enable those features? Sony, the company that included automatically-installing rootkits on audio CDs all in the name of DRM? You think *that* company is better?
Microsoft never actually *did* a damn thing to you, at least not on this topic. They said they were *going* to do something. Potential customers (there are no actual customers; the product hasn't been released yet!) said "do that and we won't buy it!" Microsoft said "OK, we won't do that then."
Depending on what you mean by "standards", they're doing all right there too. IE9 and 10 have pretty good HTML5 support, to the point that most sites which claim to not support IE can be made to work just by spoofing Chrome's user-agent string. IE11 has/will have more (not yet released). Office Open XML is still a bit of a clusterfuck, but at least the Office 2010 and later versions obey the spec as published. Office has also supported the Open Document Format (both open and save) since... 2010, with a plugin for 2007 I think; that was a while ago. Win7 (maybe even Vista) and above support AAC and H.264 out of the box. Windows Phone 8 connects to PCs using standard Media Transfer Protocol (same as modern Android versions); no need for special software anymore.
They do still love their proprietary wireless protocols (only a few of their wireless mice or keyboards use Bluetooth) and have certainly not abandoned WMA/WMV or anything like that, but they're doing a lot better than they used to.
Amazing how many people in this discussion have completely missed that little fact... unplug it (from the console, the power grid, or the Internet) and it can't spy on you anymore. Some people...
Meh... I'll worry about MS tracking my movement around the living room when you worry about the phone comapny tracking your movement around the country. You realize that every single cell phone can be tracked by triangulating signal strength at the towers, even if the GPS is never used, right?
Meh. If you don't like the thought of Kinect tracking you, unplug it (from the console, the power grid, or the Internet) when you aren't using it. Go ahead and flip it off first if you want to, though; it might decide that gesture is interesting enough to send it all the way to the console. Not much chance of it being interesting enough to forward on to Microsoft though, sorry...
Seriously, I work in the <REDACTED> computer security field and I'm not this paranoid. What's wrong with you people?
Fair point on the cost of the sensor being mandatory, but given that I hate using gamepad controllers (I do nearly all my gaming on the PC, a bit on my phone, and a bit of Rock Band and Dance Central) I rather like the idea of Kinect becoming a first-class peripheral. If decent games come out using it, I might even buy the console (it would be the first one I've ever bought for myself; the 360 was a gift).
Sony tried a milder version of that last generation. It bit them, hard. Really, really hard. Lawsuits and downtimes and massive expenses and multi-month losses of revenue hard.
On the extremely unlikely possibility that Microsoft would do something so stupid as what you describe, well, it's not hard to guess what would happen: the backlash would be incredible. Since you apparently failed to make this eminently logical conclusion yourself, I suspect you're a fanboy (or perhaps more accurately hater) too blinded by emotion to apply logic to the situation, so you would probably cheer if Microsoft were to do something like that. It could easily mean the end of their presence in the entire market segment within a year or two.
Oh, and to pre-emptively address the "I didn't think they'd be so stupid as to make these policies in the first place" argument: yes, that hurt them some, but they backed off before the product reached launch. Not a single customer was ever impacted in any way by those policies, because thus far, there *are* no customers, and the policies are no longer in place. So... a little stupid to push that far at and before E3, but quite smart of them to back off now, before anybody is affected.
Have you considered the absurd and audacious option of just disconnecting the Kinect when not using it? Use a power strip and turn it off when not using the console: problem solved. Use a wired Ethernet connection to the console and disconnect it when you don't need it to be online: problem solved.
It's not like the Kinect is some first cousin of the PowerPwn with built-in WiFi or something. If you disconnect it (from the console, from the power grid, or from the Internet) it has exactly zero ways to spy on you. Get a grip, people; it's not like there's some law that if you have a Xbox One, the sensor must remain online at all times. This is ludicrous.
Class-action lawsuits? Massive customer outrage (even worse than the removal of Other OS and PS2 compatibility from the PS3)?
I mean, technically, nothing... but that's a really, really idiotic argument. There's nothing preventing your ISP from posting your name, address, and list of favorite porn sites on a fucking billboard either; they have the capability if they want to. It would just be really, really bad for business.
Vote with your wallet. The gaming public won this round of the battle. If you want to win the next, show the industry that this kind of behavior leads to increased sales. Use the carrot, nor just the stick. Hell, the carrot usually works better.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a PC gamer myself. I was given an Xbox 360 some years ago, and it's probably turned on for at least an average of two hours a month... so I'm not really their target market here. But this has put the Xbox One back on my radar as a *possible* purchase, because hey, how else am I going to show my support for a company switching to customer-friendly policies before even releasing the product? It's not like you (or anybody else) were in any way harmed by Microsoft's initially announced policies. I can understand being wary, but you have nothign to hold a grudge for.
The new Kinect is supposed to massively improve on that (first) problem. As for the second problem, it's still a separate device. Why not just disconnect the cable when you're not using it?
Then, you can play Kinect games (by plugging it in) without needing to worry about Microsoft seeing your tinfoil hat collection.
Alternatively, consider the fact that the console now officially does not require an Internet connection. So... disconnect it from the network (except when you need the console to go online for some reason, like streamign video) and then you don't have to worry about Microsoft either.
This isn't Nineteen Eighty-Four, people. There's no mandate to keep the Kinect connected to the Internet all the time. Turn off the power to the console if you want, that will work too! My 360 is on a nice power strip that I can turn on or off in half a second with a toe. It's not a big deal.
Where'd you get the idea of "lack of indy[sic] gaming"? Microsoft has historically been the most friendly of the major console makers towards indie developers, offering free dev tools and very low-cost publication rights on their (Xbox Live Indie Games) online store. Although it has not yet been announced whether the Xb1 will be able to play existing or new XBLIG titles, I see no reason to assume they wouldn't; the games are written using XNA, which compiles to.NET bytecode (architecture independent, so the switch from PPC to x86 won't matter) and DirectX shaders (which will almost certainly still be supported).
While you are, of course, completely welcome to buy or not buy as you wish... we (the potential customers, and also the people who were pissed off by the announced situation) need to applaud this move. Microsoft (and the industry as a whole) needs to see that giving people what they want has benefits. If everybody says "Wow, took you long enough to figure that out... fuck you anyhow", then the message that the industry will take away is "The Xbox One was a flop anyhow; nobody actually gave a damn about the DRM". That's *not* the message we want to send.
So... don't buy it if you don't want it. That's a completely reasonable stance. But don't refuse to buy it because the company originally planned to have more lockdown, and then backed off. That's not how you signal that you don't want lockdown!
Speaking as somebody whose family has lived on the ocean for over 18 years, marine-grade stainlees is pretty near impervious to seawater. You need to check it periodically, of course, but if you use the right stuff (which is closer to the "20x cost of mild steel" end of the range) it will happily endure for a very long time without even significant discoloration. Of course, it helps there the boat also has zincs and that we're careful about dissimilar metals and so forth. Nonetheless, a really good grade of stainless (one way to tell is to check with a powerful magnet; good stainless is not noticeably magnetic) is able to endure seawater much better than you imply. You just can't be cheap about it... which makes it impractical as a building material in most cases.
They make excellent keyboards and mice, decent webcams, and used to have great joysticks as well. Windows Phone is very far in third place, but it nonetheless is solidly in third place and its marketshare is growing. Microsoft sells a *lot* of software, not just Office and Windows (and Visual Studio, and enterprise-y things like SQL Server).
Microsoft Stores offer people a place to try things - like Surface or Kinect, or even Win8 - prior to buying. They also provide a place for people to go when having problems with Microsoft products, and a place to buy a Windows computer without all the OEM-image garbage crapping on the performance and stability.
Actually, the Surface Pro sales appear to have been pretty good. RT not so much, but still well enough to, for example, completely trounce Chromebooks (which Best Buy also sells; yeah I had to go into one a while ago, but I actually got a good deal compared to online for once).
As for things that MS (and MS Stores) sells: Xboxes, Xbox peripherals (controllers, hard drives, Kinect, etc.), Xbox games. PC peripherals (mice, keyboards, webcams, gamepads), Windows, PC productivity software, PC games. Windows phones and Windows Phone accessories plus associated service plans. Third-party OEM computers (laptops and tablets) with "clean" Windows + Office installations. Surface Pro, Surface RT, and Surface accessories. Servicing for Xboxes, Surfaces, Windows phones, and Windows software.
Confirm same in both the Seattle and San Francisco stores. Seattle might have an "excuse" - it's near MS headquarters, and in walking distance of a very large university - but the San Francisco one was just as full even though it was near closing time. They seem to draw about the same size of crowds as Apple stores, in my experience, leaving aside spikes in traffic toward either one following a major product release.
Actually acknowledging facts that indicate Microsoft's stores are doing fine would be contrary to the groupthink, though, so don't expect nearly the mod points that the jokers get.
Games may come with DRM on the PC, but the platform itself doesn't have any built in. I play old games I already owned, and buy others from Good Old Games (some of which, like The Witcher 2, are actually new games) and Humble Bundles, specifically because they are DRM free. I also play a few games that, by their very nature, are online; I'm OK with that, so long as I know what I'm getting into and the company doesn't try to pull a bait-and-switch.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing is, it's actually exactly the other way around. The usual complaint about Win8 (and Windows RT) is that it doesn't look like Windows. However, "underneath" it's exactly Windows, aside from running on ARM (and you may be too young to remember, but the NT family - which includes Win7 and Win8 - has always come on multiple architectures; with NT6.2 they dropped Itanium and picked up ARM). Remove the restriction to Microsoft-signed binaries on the desktop, and you have a decent Windows machine which simply requires that native apps be recompiled first (.NET apps run on-modified, and there's even some hacked-up support for Java and Python).
Actually, leaving aside the built-in apps (of which the only really performance-sensitive one is IE), it's actually pretty easy to enable running traditional Windows apps on Windows RT. The "jailbreak" script is public and dead easy to use. .NET apps will run un-modified. Native ones need to be recompiled, but there's already quite a few which have been (including a number of games, which will definitely benefit from improved performance). Alternatively, there's also an x86 dynamic recompilation layer which allows running native apps unmodified (handy since most Windows apps are closed source and thus can't be easily recompiled) although the performance is of course not great (which means that a faster CPU will help a lot there too).
http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2130
Because Win8 (and WRT) both use the same API (WinRT) and an app published for one is either automatically available for the other, or requires only a trivial recompile, and because while Win8 may be *relatively* unpopular, it's actually very widely installed. Write a Win8 app, put it on the store, sell it to people who have Win8 (and, conveniently enough with no extra work on your part, also to the people who have Windows RT).
For what it's worth, you actually can develop in .NET for Windows RT - either through official channels (the Windows Store supports all .NET languages, though you have to use XAML, HTML5, or DirectX for graphics, not WinForms or console or anything traditional like that...) or through development for "jailbroken" tablets (once the restriction to Microsoft-signed binaries on the desktop is gone, Windows RT will very happily run .NET 4.0 or later code, provided it was compiled for "AnyCPU" as is the default in Visual Studio).
The OS also comes with csc.exe (the C# compiler) and there's a .NET IDE which has been ported to run on the OS, so you can even develop code on Surface RT. Not saying you *should*, necessarily - the Touch Cover is in fact usable for coding, but I'd want at least a Type Cover before doing serious work - but you can.
One of the things that's always bugged me about Java generics: array allocation. The following code works in C#. It does not work in Java:
class bar<t> {
t[] baz;
public bar() {
baz = new t[10];
}
}
To make something like that work in Java (which I've had to do before), prepare to get your hands dirty with Reflection or to be doing a lot of explicit casts. It's really annoying.
Distint signed and unsigned variants of all integer types (handy for interop with native code, and occasionally for other things), "using" blocks (forces an object to be cleaned up when it goes out of scope, instead of whenever the garbage collector gets around to noticing that it's out of scope), destructors (no, Java finalize() does *not* count), lambdas (and delegates in general; the closest thing Java has to a simple function pointer is ridiculously verbose), LINQ or anything like it, better generics that let you do things like allocating an array of the generic type without absurd reflection hacks...
As a language, C# is just much, much better.
Comments aren't good enough? If some code is going to throw exceptions on a ragular basis and these exceptions aren't documented, that's not code I want to be using.
On the flip side, it pisses me off to need to write try-ignore wrappers around code that I know will never throw the exception in question.
As a matter of fact, it does. I mean, strictly speaking it's at \\.\C:\Windows\SUA\dev\null, but according to bash: /dev/null /dev/null
/dev/fs/C/Windows/SUA/
$ ls -l
crw-rw-rw- 1 +SYSTEM 0 48, 0 Dec 5 2012
$ uname -a
Interix Jayne 6.2 10.0.7063.0 authenticamd AMD64_Family_21_Model_2_Stepping_0
$ echo $SUA_ROOT
Java is actually not "entirely OOP based" although it's close enough for most purposes. Example:
17.ToString()
works in C#. It (or the eqivalent 17.toString()) does not work in Java.
In .NET, everything is an object. "int" is another name for Int32, which is a struct (stack-allocated, value-passed object) that inherits from Object and implements a number of interfaces (IComparable, etc.).
Exactly...
Sony is better on the subject of DRM? Sony, the company that retroactively removed features from their last console via mandatory update? Sony, the company that sued hackers who managed to re-enable those features? Sony, the company that included automatically-installing rootkits on audio CDs all in the name of DRM? You think *that* company is better?
Microsoft never actually *did* a damn thing to you, at least not on this topic. They said they were *going* to do something. Potential customers (there are no actual customers; the product hasn't been released yet!) said "do that and we won't buy it!" Microsoft said "OK, we won't do that then."
Some people...
Depending on what you mean by "standards", they're doing all right there too. IE9 and 10 have pretty good HTML5 support, to the point that most sites which claim to not support IE can be made to work just by spoofing Chrome's user-agent string. IE11 has/will have more (not yet released). Office Open XML is still a bit of a clusterfuck, but at least the Office 2010 and later versions obey the spec as published. Office has also supported the Open Document Format (both open and save) since... 2010, with a plugin for 2007 I think; that was a while ago. Win7 (maybe even Vista) and above support AAC and H.264 out of the box. Windows Phone 8 connects to PCs using standard Media Transfer Protocol (same as modern Android versions); no need for special software anymore.
They do still love their proprietary wireless protocols (only a few of their wireless mice or keyboards use Bluetooth) and have certainly not abandoned WMA/WMV or anything like that, but they're doing a lot better than they used to.
Amazing how many people in this discussion have completely missed that little fact... unplug it (from the console, the power grid, or the Internet) and it can't spy on you anymore. Some people...
Meh... I'll worry about MS tracking my movement around the living room when you worry about the phone comapny tracking your movement around the country. You realize that every single cell phone can be tracked by triangulating signal strength at the towers, even if the GPS is never used, right?
Meh. If you don't like the thought of Kinect tracking you, unplug it (from the console, the power grid, or the Internet) when you aren't using it. Go ahead and flip it off first if you want to, though; it might decide that gesture is interesting enough to send it all the way to the console. Not much chance of it being interesting enough to forward on to Microsoft though, sorry...
Seriously, I work in the <REDACTED> computer security field and I'm not this paranoid. What's wrong with you people?
Fair point on the cost of the sensor being mandatory, but given that I hate using gamepad controllers (I do nearly all my gaming on the PC, a bit on my phone, and a bit of Rock Band and Dance Central) I rather like the idea of Kinect becoming a first-class peripheral. If decent games come out using it, I might even buy the console (it would be the first one I've ever bought for myself; the 360 was a gift).
Sony tried a milder version of that last generation. It bit them, hard. Really, really hard. Lawsuits and downtimes and massive expenses and multi-month losses of revenue hard.
On the extremely unlikely possibility that Microsoft would do something so stupid as what you describe, well, it's not hard to guess what would happen: the backlash would be incredible. Since you apparently failed to make this eminently logical conclusion yourself, I suspect you're a fanboy (or perhaps more accurately hater) too blinded by emotion to apply logic to the situation, so you would probably cheer if Microsoft were to do something like that. It could easily mean the end of their presence in the entire market segment within a year or two.
Oh, and to pre-emptively address the "I didn't think they'd be so stupid as to make these policies in the first place" argument: yes, that hurt them some, but they backed off before the product reached launch. Not a single customer was ever impacted in any way by those policies, because thus far, there *are* no customers, and the policies are no longer in place. So... a little stupid to push that far at and before E3, but quite smart of them to back off now, before anybody is affected.
Have you considered the absurd and audacious option of just disconnecting the Kinect when not using it? Use a power strip and turn it off when not using the console: problem solved. Use a wired Ethernet connection to the console and disconnect it when you don't need it to be online: problem solved.
It's not like the Kinect is some first cousin of the PowerPwn with built-in WiFi or something. If you disconnect it (from the console, from the power grid, or from the Internet) it has exactly zero ways to spy on you. Get a grip, people; it's not like there's some law that if you have a Xbox One, the sensor must remain online at all times. This is ludicrous.
Class-action lawsuits? Massive customer outrage (even worse than the removal of Other OS and PS2 compatibility from the PS3)?
I mean, technically, nothing... but that's a really, really idiotic argument. There's nothing preventing your ISP from posting your name, address, and list of favorite porn sites on a fucking billboard either; they have the capability if they want to. It would just be really, really bad for business.
Vote with your wallet. The gaming public won this round of the battle. If you want to win the next, show the industry that this kind of behavior leads to increased sales. Use the carrot, nor just the stick. Hell, the carrot usually works better.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a PC gamer myself. I was given an Xbox 360 some years ago, and it's probably turned on for at least an average of two hours a month... so I'm not really their target market here. But this has put the Xbox One back on my radar as a *possible* purchase, because hey, how else am I going to show my support for a company switching to customer-friendly policies before even releasing the product? It's not like you (or anybody else) were in any way harmed by Microsoft's initially announced policies. I can understand being wary, but you have nothign to hold a grudge for.
The new Kinect is supposed to massively improve on that (first) problem. As for the second problem, it's still a separate device. Why not just disconnect the cable when you're not using it?
Then, you can play Kinect games (by plugging it in) without needing to worry about Microsoft seeing your tinfoil hat collection.
Alternatively, consider the fact that the console now officially does not require an Internet connection. So... disconnect it from the network (except when you need the console to go online for some reason, like streamign video) and then you don't have to worry about Microsoft either.
This isn't Nineteen Eighty-Four, people. There's no mandate to keep the Kinect connected to the Internet all the time. Turn off the power to the console if you want, that will work too! My 360 is on a nice power strip that I can turn on or off in half a second with a toe. It's not a big deal.
Where'd you get the idea of "lack of indy[sic] gaming"? Microsoft has historically been the most friendly of the major console makers towards indie developers, offering free dev tools and very low-cost publication rights on their (Xbox Live Indie Games) online store. Although it has not yet been announced whether the Xb1 will be able to play existing or new XBLIG titles, I see no reason to assume they wouldn't; the games are written using XNA, which compiles to .NET bytecode (architecture independent, so the switch from PPC to x86 won't matter) and DirectX shaders (which will almost certainly still be supported).
While you are, of course, completely welcome to buy or not buy as you wish... we (the potential customers, and also the people who were pissed off by the announced situation) need to applaud this move. Microsoft (and the industry as a whole) needs to see that giving people what they want has benefits. If everybody says "Wow, took you long enough to figure that out... fuck you anyhow", then the message that the industry will take away is "The Xbox One was a flop anyhow; nobody actually gave a damn about the DRM". That's *not* the message we want to send.
So... don't buy it if you don't want it. That's a completely reasonable stance. But don't refuse to buy it because the company originally planned to have more lockdown, and then backed off. That's not how you signal that you don't want lockdown!
Or (in the terms that people in this area usually think in) just over 24 bits of entropy. (~24.135)
That is absurdly low for an auto-generated single-use password.
Speaking as somebody whose family has lived on the ocean for over 18 years, marine-grade stainlees is pretty near impervious to seawater. You need to check it periodically, of course, but if you use the right stuff (which is closer to the "20x cost of mild steel" end of the range) it will happily endure for a very long time without even significant discoloration. Of course, it helps there the boat also has zincs and that we're careful about dissimilar metals and so forth. Nonetheless, a really good grade of stainless (one way to tell is to check with a powerful magnet; good stainless is not noticeably magnetic) is able to endure seawater much better than you imply. You just can't be cheap about it... which makes it impractical as a building material in most cases.
They make excellent keyboards and mice, decent webcams, and used to have great joysticks as well. Windows Phone is very far in third place, but it nonetheless is solidly in third place and its marketshare is growing. Microsoft sells a *lot* of software, not just Office and Windows (and Visual Studio, and enterprise-y things like SQL Server).
Microsoft Stores offer people a place to try things - like Surface or Kinect, or even Win8 - prior to buying. They also provide a place for people to go when having problems with Microsoft products, and a place to buy a Windows computer without all the OEM-image garbage crapping on the performance and stability.
Actually, the Surface Pro sales appear to have been pretty good. RT not so much, but still well enough to, for example, completely trounce Chromebooks (which Best Buy also sells; yeah I had to go into one a while ago, but I actually got a good deal compared to online for once).
As for things that MS (and MS Stores) sells:
Xboxes, Xbox peripherals (controllers, hard drives, Kinect, etc.), Xbox games.
PC peripherals (mice, keyboards, webcams, gamepads), Windows, PC productivity software, PC games.
Windows phones and Windows Phone accessories plus associated service plans.
Third-party OEM computers (laptops and tablets) with "clean" Windows + Office installations.
Surface Pro, Surface RT, and Surface accessories.
Servicing for Xboxes, Surfaces, Windows phones, and Windows software.
Confirm same in both the Seattle and San Francisco stores. Seattle might have an "excuse" - it's near MS headquarters, and in walking distance of a very large university - but the San Francisco one was just as full even though it was near closing time. They seem to draw about the same size of crowds as Apple stores, in my experience, leaving aside spikes in traffic toward either one following a major product release.
Actually acknowledging facts that indicate Microsoft's stores are doing fine would be contrary to the groupthink, though, so don't expect nearly the mod points that the jokers get.
Games may come with DRM on the PC, but the platform itself doesn't have any built in. I play old games I already owned, and buy others from Good Old Games (some of which, like The Witcher 2, are actually new games) and Humble Bundles, specifically because they are DRM free. I also play a few games that, by their very nature, are online; I'm OK with that, so long as I know what I'm getting into and the company doesn't try to pull a bait-and-switch.