Gizmodo ran a piece this morning about the Microsoft Retail Experience. You can read about it here:
Microsoft’s Fake Retail Store Looks Good, Reminds Us Of Their Real Retail Store
It’s an absolutely gorgeous virtual store. Those of you who have been to the Microsoft Store on campus can attest that it’s nothing like this. And if it were, you’d probably never leave. If this were to come to fruition it would surely give the Apple Store a run for its money. So one of the questions is, will it ever see the light of day?
Something that might be holding them back is the uncertainty of retail itself. With retail stores folding left and right and with online sales gathering more momentum each year it would certainly be understandable if this was giving them cold feet. But now could be just the time to buck that trend. There is certainly enough retail space and mall space opening up so I can’t believe that lack of suitable space would be an issue. There’s a lot of people out of work so I have to think that staffing concerns would not be an issue either. If ever the time was right in terms of these two issues and the economy now would have to be it.
No, I have to think that it has to do with how Microsoft has positioned itself with its partner ecosystem. Microsoft did a lot of things right when it was rising to dominance in the PC and software world. It made the decision to encourage partners to sell their software instead of doing it by themselves and it provided the best development tools to enable developers to provide their own software as well which drove sales of Windows through the roof. If Microsoft were to launch their own stores they would risk alienating that partner ecosystem that helped to drive them to the top of the software world.
But I can’t help but wonder, how much of a risk is that really? Apple did just that to their reseller partners when they launched their retail stores and look at how well that turned out. For Apple of course, not those resellers. But one could certainly argue that those resellers weren’t really doing all that much for Apple anyway. And I think that the same thing can probably be said about the Microsoft resellers today.
One could also wonder whether Microsoft is holding off on this because they’re getting tired of all of the comparisons to Apple. Because if they do decide to forge ahead with this they will surely hear another round of “There they go copying Apple again.” But who cares if that happens? Microsoft is certainly capable of providing a retail experience every bit as good as Apple’s and maybe even better and that would certainly put all of the copycat arguments to rest. And what if each store were to have a section that was devoted to things that were coming from Microsoft Research? How exciting would that be? I for one think that Microsoft retail stores might be just the thing to get them going again.
