Imagining a Microsoft Store

Microsoft Stores - who cares.

Who cares ?

Microsoft is a great company if the year is 1985.

Let's just focus on a smooth transition out of the PCazoic era.

MS has been exercising questionable judgment...

for the last few years. The question is not what they'll do in their stores, or with whom they'll be competing, but what advantage they gain by spending all that capital to enter a retail space that they, themselves made a commodity space.

look at on campus stores to get an idea

Microsoft campus and redmond and silicon valley have stores for employee. They are full of interesting stuff, xbox, games, xbox accessories, different OS versions, office versions, different styles of keyboards and mice, T-shirts, and Zune to name a few things.

It's another pretty lame

It's another pretty lame plan by Microsoft. Must they ALWYAS do what someone else did, in a half baked way three years later? Every single thing they do follows that mold.

What will their version of the "genius bar" be called???

Howbout "Dumb Ass Corral"?

MS Store

the Genius bar will be named The Excuse Bar

WTF!

Microsoft stores? It shows you the thinking behind MS people. Copy off other people's success, or buy them off then screw it up. They have no direction. And Balmer is just an obnoxious SOB. BG does not need this sh*t any more. Just a TOTAL WASTE of time and money, which they have alot.

How I imagine a MS store

I imagine the store as a place where the doors lock randomly and the lights flicker on and off. The genius bar will be outsourced to a developing technology country, and while you wait in line an employee will walk around telling you how much they appreciate your business and then poke you in a random spot with a sharp object.

I think MS has way too much baggage and too many image problems to pull this off with any level of success.

What to call the Microsoft tech crew

Microsmurfs?

sigh

Why does Microsoft feel the need to have a store? Money. But I really don't like yet another "ME TOO!" thing from Microsoft. I am so tired of that and I don't respect it. This is what they have done from the start, since bilking the original DOS writer out of possible millions. This has been their patter; copy other success, mostly Apple's. In my humble opinion their opening of stores is just a pathetic child-like attitude of "me too!".

This is Insane!

After all these years Microsoft has yet to launch a product that even compares to an Apple product and now they are going to go up against The Apple Store. Microsoft just give up! You will never be what Apple is today no matter how hard you try to copy what they do!

This is Insane!

After all these years Microsoft has yet to launch a product that even compares to an Apple product and now they are going to go up against The Apple Store. Microsoft just give up! You will never be what Apple is today no matter how hard you try to copy what they do!

Balmer is jealous. That's

Balmer is jealous. That's all there is to it. First he trashes most everything Apple, then he tries to copy it, badly.

This good for all of us!

Microsoft provided for all of us the framework (with apple) to start our businesses and bring us out of the ink and paper way of doing things. The explosion of technology, gadgets, robotics, scientific research and more. I actually think going to a Microsoft soft store is good. My commendation to Microsoft for finally doing it. One last request, please lower your prices for operating systems!

Microsoft sees the writing on the wall...

Microsoft is just reading the writing on the wall. With the failures of CompUSA and Circuit City and possibly Best Buy, they now know how fragile their reseller market is. That the possibility exists within the next two years, the biggest computer, game, and music device resellers in the brick and mortar arena will be big box stores. That's right Walmart, Kmart, and Target! How hard do you think they are going to push Microsoft products? Funny. They'll be where Apple was ten plus years ago.

Whose the fanboy?

I've been to the Apple genius bar 6 times in 3 different locations, and every time the people were extremely helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. They were able to fix my issue each time too. None of them were pretentious in the least. Maybe you're hung up on the title of the help desk?

Not without risk....

This is a branding exercise, but not without risk. You can imagine the genius bar conversations: Customer: Hi, the FBI called and told me my home PC is serving up warez and porn. Can you help me?
Genius: Sure. Let's start by talking a bit about how you might have gotten into this predicament. Are you running Vista? No, XP. Service Pack 3? No, 2. Are you running current anti-virus software? Uh, not sure. Do you know which version of Internet Explorer you are running? I don't know, 6? Do you or any of your family members visit sites of questionable nature? You know, like porn or warez, hate sites, Islamist sites, anything like that. I don't think I want to answer that.
Genius: Well, if you'd like we can do a reformat and reinstall for you for a nominal fee.
Customer: [grabs PC and stalks off.]

Somehow I just don't see customer riots as being good for your brand image.

microsoft store and ads

Maybe they'll take up the retail space vacated by Woolworths in the U.K? just what we needed,stores full of "geeksumables" right next to the umpteen mobile phone stores.
Surely we know where to get everything already?.
Now,i AM " a P.C." (as the line goes)..but the current t,v, ad just went overboard with the geekiness.
All bits of cut-out paper,drawings,"naively" animated,and an "over the phone" "voice over". Too much..
If these ads are anything to go by,if your not dresseed in Khaki,smoking a joint and carrying a burlap rucksack with a CND badge on it,you'll feel mighty out of place in those stores!

What's next?

There's no way around it: No matter what Microsoft offers at their retail stores, they'll be competing with many if not most of their partners. They'll be selling products that BestBuy et. al already offer. What's that about?

If Microsoft is willing to encroach on their software partners' hallowed ground, what's to say they won't go further by developing a Microsoft-branded PC? After all -- and I don't need to hear from those of you who are legally blind -- Microsoft has pretty much made copying Apple their business model.

Microsoft is, essentially, retroactively mimicking Apple. The next logical step would be to sell and market both the hardware and the software.

Microsoft did something similar with their XBox, taking on Sony and Nintendo. They have the money to lose if this venture fails. If they succeed, they'll be hailed as a reborn company that adjusted to marked change in the longterm. If they fail, well, it'll be chalked up as just another Microsoft failed attempt, and they'll be given an 'A' for effort by those who cannot live without Windows.

What are they going to Sell at the Stores?

What are they going to sell at the MS stores? Zune points? will the sales people have instant access to Tech support while they are trying to demonstrate a windows machine gone haywire? or another Zune Freeze Event? or a bad bad virus infects my PC? or an Xbox gets the ring of death while a gamer is playing? are they going to do demonstrations of Office (oh goody) I just hope that Steve Ballmer does not start wearing tight turtle necks and starts doing Keynote presentations, nothing worse than a bald fat dude trying to pack 40lbs of fat into a 2lb bag (yuck)

Microsoft

I'm so curious why MS and Bill Gates actually put out such a broken product ?

..and pasmith thanks for fine writing.

Service Pack 1

Like every Microsoft innovation, I'll wait until MS Store SP1 comes out that fixes the bugs in MS Store 1.0 and halves the time it takes to load a competent employee for my use.

General Commercial Fault - The store is down.
Please reboot system.

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The last original thing Microsoft did was to imagine programming a microcomputer using a higher-level language (if BASIC can be called a "higher-level language.")


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