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Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

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Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#151

Post by vtbassmatt »

dkdk8283 wrote: post #141
sterwill wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be the case. I rarely go inside my local mall (Southpoint, Durham NC), but on sunny weekends the Apple store was often jam-packed with people. So busy that customers had a hard time getting through the door. Sales people talking non-stop and processing orders as fast as possible. There was a Microsoft store inside the main mall building, just a few minutes away. I walked by it a few times, but it was usually…

South point Apple has always been painful - I avoided it like the plague. I think it’s the only store in the area besides Charlotte.

Crabtree has one too. It's just as crowded and awful.

Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#152

Post by sushshshsh »

MivLives wrote: post #68
sushshshsh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always remembered walking along the Charles, really far west of the Mass Ave bridge and asking myself "why is there a Microcenter here?"

It is right next to Harvard and pretty close to MIT. There's a bunch of other larger stores in the area. Beats the one closest to Philly, which was a decent drive out of town.

I guess I should be happy that there was a microcenter within walking distance of those schools, but if you live on the other side of the Charles like me and the other commenter, you will experience many a frosty 20 minute walk across that cursed bridge to get from the Green line to the Red line :)

Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#153

Post by mytherin »

madoublet wrote: post #103
mytherin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks more to me like they are giving up on their Surface line-up specifically, rather than all their consumer focused products. The Microsoft stores & Surface line was Microsoft's attempt at copying Apple with expensive devices with solid build quality and good support. It saw some success but apparently not enough.

I don't think the announcement has anything to do with the Surface lineup. I expect that to be around for awhile.

I think it's definitely related. At least it is my impression the Microsoft stores exist primarily for the Surface lineup. I also don't expect them to end the Surface lineup immediately, but it signals that they are at the very least slowing investment in that area.

Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#155

Post by ptero »

simonh wrote: post #111
muststopmyths wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with the SF Westfield Center store. Great staff. It was a good place to check out various Surfaces in person as well. I will say, the surfaces/laptops side of the store was usually empty. Some kids playing with the Xbox or people at the counter getting help seemed to be the extent of traffic the past couple of years. They seem to be aggressively destroying any paltry remaining goodwill with consumer enthusiasts.…

I don't really see the connection. If the only traffic to the stores was a handful of people, how can this have any significant effect on customer good will? They can't be both empty and influential. It seems like the stores were a missed opportunity, but they always had the odds stacked against them. Whatever you can get in an MS store, you could get a much cheaper alternative running the same software at another el…

> It seems like the stores were a missed opportunity, but they always had the odds stacked against them.

Odds were against Microsoft stores being profitable because Microsoft is now an underdog in consumer tech. If you want hardware (possibly with the exception of xbox; I just do not know, never had one), Microsoft is rarely the name that jumps to mind. But this is exactly why Microsoft should keep them (using some profits from OS and software), even at a loss, to provide demos and let folks play with their toys. Not doing this means riding much more on inertia of existing corporate Windows 10 and Office installations. This is very profitable and still has a lot of inertia, but abandoning consumer tech is putting a $1.5 trillion dollar company into a more vulnerable long-term position.

Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#156

Post by bcrosby95 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #130
blibble wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's one of the pathetic excuses I've ever read they're an OS developer and they can't spend a day figuring out a floating point bug? maybe redirect some of the time integrating Candy Crush

They don't own the code

According to the link: they licensed the code and had access to it. But none of them wrote it and they couldn't justify the days of debugging that would be required when they had millions of other LOC to test and port.

Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#157

Post by snapetom »

reaperducer wrote: post #127
gipp wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but a large portion of the Apple store crowds has always been people just hanging around and goofing off on the laptops. IIRC it's policy in those places to always let people do that however long they want, even if there's clearly no intent to buy anything. I've always wondered what portion of those crowds are actually customers. EDIT: Yes, everyone, I understand the marketing and lifetime-value reasons for doi…

I've always wondered what portion of those crowds are actually customers. It doesn't really matter, though, because as the OP pointed out, Apple Stores are massively profitable. This is well known in retail circles. Landlords fall all over themselves to get Apple Stores. Real estate developers will include Apple Stores, or Apple Store lookalikes in their renderings even before the buildings are built, just to get peo…

Plus, it gave Apple the perception that there's higher demand for Apple products over Microsoft. Some average Joe thinking about a tablet walks by a packed Apple Store and an empty Microsoft store. It's pretty obvious how that influences their decision.

Microsoft set up a lot of stores in the same malls as Apple Stores. This disparity in numbers has always been the case, no matter how good the MS experience has been as others have pointed out. Seems Apple learned their lessons from the first time the battled Microsoft. Consumers don't do as deep of a research as the tech crowd thinks.

Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#158

Post by reaperducer »

ta17711771 wrote: post #136
reaperducer wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe having a physical store that lowers the barrier for making warranty claims, especially “shaky” ones, isn’t a profit maker. Cost to fix a shaky piece of kit: $100 Future sale made because someone is happy with your service: $1,000 While I like to blame this sort of myopic thinking on SV, it seems like an entire generation, or two, has forgotten that if you make someone happy today, you've made a customer for lif…

> Cost to fix a shaky piece of kit: $100 if they spend an hour or two fixing a screen your kid smashed for free, the screen costs $30-$50 wholesale, 1-2 hrs of labor, and fixed costs for the day like power, insurance, lease payment, etc...

And if they just have to click some setting, the parts cost is $0, and the labor is already factored into the person already being there.

Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#159

Post by dustinmoris »

ptero wrote: post #104
AlphaWeaver wrote: post #21

This is a real shame. We have (had?) a Microsoft Store in the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham), and my visits to that store were always really enjoyable. I made several warranty claims in-store, and they went above and beyond to help me out, even when my grounds for a claim were kinda shaky. Microsoft did a really good job of hiring diverse talent, and every store-clerk I ever interacted with was smart, nice, and seemed to…

Agree on "this is a real shame" feeling. I am not, in general, a heavy Microsoft user: my workstations both at home and in the office run Linux. But a few years ago, when I saw a Microsoft Surface tablet when I walked by the Microsoft store as I was waiting for my wife at the mall I was wowed by its ergonomics. Within three months I bought one as a personal travel laptop and another one for work as my main laptop. An…

Interestingly for me it was almost the opposite experience. I got really excited about the Surface Book and was really close to buy one, then a couple days later I walked past the Microsoft Store on Oxford Street and saw one in real life and was extremely shocked/disappointed how huge, heavy and really really thick it is. It made me realise how unportable this portable device is and I never thought again of buying a Surface book. I think the latest Surface Book still has that monster big ass fist thick hinge and I'm not surprised that I haven't seen a single person with a Surface Book in a coffee shop yet. It's too big for being a portable device. So in some respect, the physical store has meant that they sold one device less in my case.

Re: Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores

#160

Post by nitrogen »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #97
nitrogen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the kind of corporate nightmarish product that could only arise from those two. Even if the "value add" was a pro-level photo to boost job offers, why are we using photos for job offers in the first place?

Good looking people cause enjoyable chemical reactions to occur in people’s brains. If you take two identically qualified people, the person who appears/sounds more pleasing to the buyer will win the business. It’s part of nature, for better or for worse.

Orchestras introduced blind auditions to address this bias. Why don't we do that for other jobs? I say this as someone who would probably fall in one of the categories of people who would supposedly benefit from this bias.
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