171–180 of 290 posts
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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.
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I saw Ron Johnson speak around 2012 in San Mateo. He oversaw the initial rise of the Apple Store. I remember him saying Jobs told him there was basically an unlimited budget to make the stores a success. The difference is it only took Apple three years to reach $1B in annual sales.
> The difference is it only took Apple three years to reach $1B in annual sales. It took far more than that to earn the trust of consumers. Microsoft decided to sit back, collect rent on Windows/Office, and let other business do the hard work of customer service and let their customers deal with malware on their laptops. Contrast with Apple, who put customer service front and center, opened stores that my parents cou…
They upped their game with the built in Windows Defender to the point where you don’t need third party AV because it’s rated so highly.
> Contrast with Apple, who put customer service front and center, opened stores that my parents could go to and talk to someone if they had a problem.
Like all the retail stores Microsoft opened, which people in this thread are saying provided a really good experience?
> Microsoft had all the cash in the world to make it happen. But instead, they put Candy Crush in the start menu.
Contrast with Apple who put sponsored results in the App Store and prevent you from deleting default apps in macOS Catalina? https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/dfetr4/comment/f32q81e
In some sense, this is a big window of opportunity for Dell to get smart and fix their website from looking like a warehouse dump for nerds who want the best deal and give a shit about specs, to actual customers who just to see an intuitive product line-up and extra details if and when they want that.
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The surface product lines generates a lot of interest.
Apple sells 100s of phones and iPads for each surface sold. One can't just take their store model without their context and think it will be as successful. Plus you can get a surface at any store, no need to go to a Microsoft store that sells a random assortment of a computers (not just their own) where a new user might not realize a Surface is a Microsoft product.
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https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58...
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're an OS developer and they can't spend a day figuring out a floating point bug?
Maybe it’s bad to argue by appeal to authority, but I take Raymond Chen’s side that it was a hard problem to debug in the time available over some internet sneering that it must have been easy, any day.
Note that this discounts design superiority/inferiority.
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> 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. Maybe having a physical store that lowers the barrier for making warranty claims, especially “shaky” ones, isn’t a profit maker. ;)
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…
It's not like Microsoft didn't have popular stuff to sell, especially the Xbox.
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…
I agree, but I kinda feel like the relaxed and comfortable atmosphere was more of an indication that the stores weren’t doing so hot. Every time I went to one is was because it was quieter and lower key than other stores. And I never actually wanted to buy things. Maybe that’s good(ish) marketing but probably doesn’t make good business sense.