Microsoft Closes Retail Stores

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Microsoft has announced it is closing almost all of its retail Stores (and the few that won’t close won’t be selling products and will be turned into
[See the full post at: Microsoft Closes Retail Stores]

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woody

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Microsoft tried to copycat Apple and failed for 11 years.
While Apple stores where always full with people, Microsoft stores, which opened in the same moll, street.. were always empty.

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rc primak, OscarCP, Cybertooth

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Is this a reaction to Apple’s positively killer Mac announcements earlier this week?

https://www.aboveavalon.com/dailypremiumupdate/2020/5/14/google-pixel-shakeup-consumer-spending-during-the-pandemic-surface-sales-vs-ipad-and-mac-sales

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All AI and Cloud coupled with the secular deprecation of Windows OS.

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rc primak

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AskWoody_MVP Rick Corbett was the first to post about this on AskWoody, with a link to Mary Jo Foley’s article in ZDNet. His topic has a link to this thread.

Losing access to physical stores can definitely impact any user of a particular brand of hardware. Living in a place where there has never been ready access to Microsoft or Apple stores, I can vouch for how much easier it was to get my iTouch fixed by walking it into the store, when visiting my brother. There are plenty of Surface users that have had a similar quick and satisfied fix by visiting a physical store.

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rc primak, satrow, Microfix, Myst

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It just shows that there are some things that will always be done better in person rather than digitally.

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rc primak

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Woody asks: “Is this a reaction to Apple’s positively killer Mac announcements earlier this week?”

Maybe, but it seems to me, at least, a bit more likely that MS, same as other large companies with global market reach and, consequently, employing many people working in sales and marketing plus their office support staff, are downsizing their public-facing operations, because of the immediate and likely enduring consequences of the present pandemic emergency and consequent economic recession: few people showing up at brick-and-mortar shops and few buying anything there or even online from these companies, while the shop’s rent still has to be paid along with taxes, insurance, maintenance, wages… So: shop closures and personnel retrenchments ranging from unpaid furloughs to outright firings. And, as Alex5723 has pointed out here, MS stores were never exactly mobbed. I can’t vouch for this myself, but it seems a likely thing, because I never went to any of these stores or even knew they existed. And I live in the metropolitan area of a major US city and have been using Windows for more than twenty years.

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I’ve been running a Microsoft OS on a plethora of compatible hardware for 30 years + and I never bought my hardware or software from a physical retail store except once and it was a bad experience.  Microsoft’s closing of all retail stores is a non-event for me.  I don’t think I’m alone.

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I’ve never even seen a Microsoft store.  I have no idea where the nearest one is.

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Charlie, Myst

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A mall near us has (had?) both a Microsoft store and an Apple store. Reports upthread about the relative popularity of each company’s store are accurate in this case: whereas the Apple store would always be full of people, the Microsoft store a few doors away would be virtually deserted.

I have no reason to enter an Apple store, but out of curiosity one time I decided to go into the Microsoft store. Everything they had on display involved either Windows 10, Surface devices, or software tied to the cloud. Realizing that there was literally nothing in the store that I had any interest in, I walked out and never went back.

 

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Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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Charlie

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Cybertooth wrote:
Everything they had on display involved either Windows 10, Surface devices, or software tied to the cloud. Realizing that there was literally nothing in the store that I had any interest in, I walked out and never went back.

Seriously? No Xbox or gaming displays? At a retail store? Really?!?
Doesn’t make any sense, but if true would certainly help explain the retail failure.

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Since retail places like Best Buy and Target sell Xbox, and probably for less money, it probably wasn’t worth it to MS and their extreme profit expectations.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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rc primak, Cybertooth

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Seriously? No Xbox or gaming displays? At a retail store? Really?!?

Honestly, now that you say that, I can’t remember one way or the other. It would make sense for Xbox-related stuff to be for sale at the MS store. But I’m guessing that my level of interest in Xbox is so low that it didn’t register. Maybe it was there and my eyes scanned right past it as something of no personal importance.  🙂

There were probably also other PC hardware accessories (mice, keyboards, etc.). But the bottom line is that there wasn’t anything in the MS store to hold my attention.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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OscarCP

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I have used a Windows PC (three successive generations of them, actually) for more than twenty years, and Macs, on and off, for even longer. Yet I never went into an MS store — or even knew they existed, until I chanced upon this thread here — and only once in my life I walked into an Apple store, and that was years ago, to ask a bewildered attendant if it was true that the then new OS X (later renamed macOS) was actually a variant of UNIX,  a system I was familiar with.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
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Charlie, Cybertooth

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Well, there’s always Best buy or the Micro Center. They sell and offer tech support for Microsoft products. But they may not be able to totally fill the gap left by closing the Microsoft retail stores. I don’t know about the relative pricing of service or the quality of service. But I doubt an on-site exchange or replacement of a battery or a whole device would be likely at stores without the official Microsoft brand attached to them.

-- rc primak

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