I am, generally, a liberal.  The relevance of this will become pertinent in a moment.

Microsoft, as you know unless insert-your-living-under-rock-cliché-here, has opened a couple of brick and mortar stores.  This is laughable for several reasons, most of which are plainly obvious even to Windows enthusiasts, but I’ll repeat them here for the sake of completeness.

• From what I’ve seen, the MicrosoftStore looks very, very, very like an Apple store.  Apart from the mute Windows logo (again, centered on a plain background above the portal like an apple might be), and the dominance of the color blue, you would be forgiven if you thought were actually walking into an Apple store, if perhaps that of a parallel universe.  I’m not suggesting that the wheel need be reinvented here, but it’s kind of embarrassing, anyway.  I assume that over time these stores will evolve to feel definitively Microsoft-y, just as you can definitely tell the difference between walking into a Target and walking into a Wal-Mart, even if you were red-blue color blind.  This is assuming they stay open long enough for such an evolution.

• Here’s where my liberalism comes in to play.  Apple started its retail adventure as a solution to a problem: there was a lack of a distribution channel between Apple and consumers that was unbiased towards PCs.  People had little chance to be exposed favorably to a Mac before; now they can just saunter along in a reasonably upscale mall in a middle- to large-sized metro area and get sucked into an Apple store.  Microsoft suffers no such problem.  Microsoft is not starved for customers, or exposure to customers, or laboring under a widespread conception that its products are not to be taken seriously.  Microsoft is the damn default!  When you say, “I want to buy a computer,” you have to actively try not to get a machine with Windows on it.  In an economy of startling variety and diversity, I am hard pressed to come up with any other product group in which there is such an overwhelming single standard brand.  Therefore, I have a hard time truly understanding why Microsoft needs to have a store in my mall.  This is like offering affirmative action assistance to rich white boys who want to go to college.

• One answer given to the above is that Microsoft wants to have face-to-face interaction with customers, to help them with the problems they have with their PCs.  They call this their Guru Bar; Apple’s version is of course the Genius Bar.  Lord knows the average Joe needs help with his PC, but I have a hard time believing that these Gurus are going to be able to handle the work load.  When you bring a Mac in to the Genius Bar, I suspect most of the time something is really wrong-a pref file got inexplicably garbled, some bit of hardware bit the dust.  Not that OS X doesn’t have bugs and problems that crop up, but there is a finite number of Macs for which you need a script of known fixes.  How many possible combinations of PCs are there?  Now multiply that by the number of OSes they are running (going back to XP SP1, at least) that people are going to be asking about.  Now factor in the likelihood that the problem is PEBKAC or viral.  The Gurus are going to be overwhelmed.  I just wish I had a bird’s eye view and a bag of popcorn.To sum this point up, I don’t think it’s possible to solve PC user problems with a “Bar” in the same way it is with Mac user problems.  It’s inherent to the product.  I’m not knocking Microsoft’s tech support, I’ve heard it’s usually very good, and it has been the time or two I’ve had occasion to use it.  I don’t know how appointments are going to work, or if support is going to be predicated on having a valid license key or what, but giving Windows users carte blanch to walk up to a counter and say fix this, and giving the Gurus 15 minutes in which to do it, is a recipe for disaster.

• Related to my affirmative action analogy, isn’t this kind of a step backwards?  Never mind Fry’s, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Costco, Office Depot/Max, and others I’ve forgotten, all of which are perfectly valid brick-and-mortar opportunities to buy a PC, there is quite a robust means of buying a PC electronically: the World Wide Web.  Maybe the point isn’t selling PCs so much as software, to which I say that the Web is an even better avenue for said purchases.  Again, what’s the point here?

The only thing I can see the MicrosoftStore is good for, similar to Xbox and Zune, is losing money.  Yes, they will offer classes and training, but those cannot possibly make enough money offset the colossal cost of renting space in a mall and staffing it, and I just don’t know what people would be buying in there to offset it, either.  If they plan on moving PCs in enough volume to make it profitable, I think some OEMs are going to get cranky really fast.  Again, I will want popcorn for this.  Operating these stores as loss-leading advertising for the Microsoft Brand™ seems particularly daft, even for Redmond.¹

Tags: Apple, Microsoft

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.