Microsoft is going to open retail stores, just like Apple. This is a quite serious plan and Microsoft is determined it will happen even though the details are still somewhat vague.

All we know is that there will be Microsoft-branded stores. And that the industry as a whole views it with considerable skepticism.

Many commentators query whether Microsoft could make the concept that worked so well for Apple work for a different company with a different ethos and totally different product. Plus a complete lack of excitement.

Running the shops will be David Porter as Microsoft corporate vice president of retail stores. The marketing and retail whiz has an impressive background, technically through Dreamworks Animation and in the mass market through Wal-Mart. Porter starts at Microsoft today. He has a long row to hoe.

Apple around the world has more than 200 stores and they are glitz, flash, attractive and normally packed. There is no news as to whether they make a profit — quite possibly they do — but it matters not. It puts the whole product line on display front and center in a way that leaves, say, advertising for dead.

Microsoft says it will use its stores to boost sales of Windows 7, Windows Mobile and Windows Live. Others suggest X-box and (an impertinent suggestion) Zunes — Microsoft’s slow-selling music players, which have never made it to the Australian market possibly because the thought was you could hardly given them away.

The general view is of severe doubt that Microsoft will be able to pull off anything as sleek and hip as Apple retail stores. Money is not everything. There is style and a certain chutzpah. Microsoft may have once had these. It doesn’t have them any more. (The suggestion that one way to pull people into the shops would be to remove Vista free and replace it with XP Professional should be ignored.)

Microsoft says it will use its stores to boost sales of Windows 7, Windows Mobile and Windows Live. Others suggest X-box and Zunes — Microsoft’s slow-selling music players, which have never made as a name to the Australian market where Zunes is generally considered to be a cough drop.

Microsoft said: ‘The purpose of opening these stores is to create deeper engagement with consumers and continue to learn firsthand about what they want and how they buy.’

It is fraught with risk. What if the first queue of customers is users wanting their computers fixed?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft has been experimenting with retail for some years.

The report said, ‘In a 20,000-square-foot warehouse near its campus in the suburbs of Seattle, Microsoft has tested various retail concepts, complete with shelves displaying Xbox games and big computer monitors with touch-sensitive screens.

‘One of Porter’s tasks will be to figure out whether to actually sell computers rather than merely show off their features. Any decision that favored some PC makers and left others off store shelves could anger these hardware partners.’

‘The failures of other stores opened by technology companies will loom over Microsoft. In 2004, Gateway shuttered a network of more than 188 company-owned retail stores.’

The Wall Street Journal notes that Microsoft itself operated a Microsoft store inside a movie-theatre complex in San Francisco, beginning in 1999. Microsoft opened microsoftSF, an 8,500-square-foot retail space in San Francisco’s Metreon shopping center, located about a block from where Apple’s insanely busy San Francisco store is currently situated.

In microsoftSF, the company showed off more than 160 hardware and software products, as well as clothing, office supplies, and other trinkets adorned with the microsoftSF logo. But two years later it shut down the store — which showcased, but didn’t sell, Microsoft products.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 5:20 pm under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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