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.

There have been some reports about the instability of the latest beta of IE 8 included with the Windows 7 beta. I haven’t experienced any of those issues yet myself. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time using the first two betas of IE 8 that I’m used to its, uh, peculiarities. That said, Microsoft has announced that IE 8 will be rolled into the Automatic Update feature of XP SP2 and above (Visat 32, 64, etc.). For those of you who cringe in horror at this, Microsoft is releasing a Blocker Toolkit for organizations (and individuals I am assuming) who want to put this off for a while. You can find it here:

IE 8 Blocker Toolkit

I tried for a while last night to get to the root of the no signal to the monitor issue that I’m seeing but I really didn’t make any progress. For those of you looking for a more in depth review of Windows 7, this one from Ars Technica is still one of the best I’ve seen.

Deep inside the Windows 7 Public Beta: an in-depth tour

I just went in to work with Windows 7 some more. And the monitor looked like it had gone to sleep again! Even though I turned that feature off. I clicked the mouse a few times and got no response. Same for the keyboard. I powered the monitor off and turned it on again. Nothing other than “No Input Signal” as I had described in the previous post. I unplugged the monitor cable going to the PC and plugged it back in and secured but still nothing. I’ll use the power button shutdown technique again but gee whiz, they’re making this tough to work with.

I got around to downloading the Windows 7 beta bits over the weekend. After reading several positive early reviews during CES week I figured what the hell, why not give it a try.

Where was I going to put it was the question? On a Parallels VM? A VMWare VM? Or maybe an HP Media Center PC that was sitting around unused? I really didn’t want to give up the drive space on my Macbook Pro. I’ve already got an XP image on both of the VMs and that’s really one too many. So, I decided to get the HP ready to go.

I started the HP, booted into XP, brought up IE, and headed to Microsoft’s site to get the beta bits. It took several hours (2.44 GB over a reasonably fast connection) but at the end I had an ISO file that I would transfer to the Mac so I could burn a DVD.

Note to Microsoft. Since most everything of any consequence coming from MSDN is an ISO file these days could you possibly include the ability to burn an ISO file without having to resort to third party software?

I burned the DVD and brought it back to the PC and got ready to tackle the install issues as they related to the hard drive and the current setup. I had a look at the partition structure and realized that I’d have to delete the partition that had the recovery tools on it. I ran the program that let me burn those tools to a DVD. But just once it told me. I guess HP doesn’t want us to give them away or whatever. Bad enough we have to supply our own DVDs for the backup. What the heck do we do if those go bad? Ah well, that’s for another time…

After finishing that task I deleted the recovery partition and proceeded to shrink the main partition. The XP partition was only using 70 GB including programs, music and photos. I created a 65 GB partition for Windows 7 and formatted it. A dreadfully slow process. I had forgotten how slow that was. I rebooted into XP, inserted the Windows 7 DVD, and waited. But just for a moment.

Up came the Windows 7 install screen. Very clean. Very simple. Click the install button or leave. I clicked Install. After that I had a choice. Upgrade or clean install? Since it was XP there would be no upgrade according to the other reviews I’d read although I don’t remember it stating this on screen. Could be I just missed it since I was planning a clean install anyway. Once I clicked on the clean install it started copying files and then expanding files and then setting things up. Not once did it require any intervention from me. It rebooted a few times and then it was finished and waiting for me to confirm country and keyboard and all of those good things. I gave it a user name and a computer name and then a password and a hint. Lastly I picked Home Network instead of Work and Public. I was presented with a Home Network key which I duly copied to a piece of paper which will probably get misplaced. I wonder if there’s a way to recover that key? I wonder too if this is new to Windows 7. I never did set up a Home Network in Vista so I can’t say. maybe someone will chime in who’s been there. Once I did all of that I was presented with the main login screen. Total time start to finish? 12 to 15 minutes tops. Pretty peppy for something that says Windows on it.

I spelunked a little through the Start Menu and found that not much has changed there from Vista. There’s a few new things but organizationally it looks the same. I did enjoy playing with the new calculator though. What can I say? I’m a cheap date!

I brought up IE ( a Windows 7 version of beta 2 I’m told) and played around there for a while. (Update: Here’s a story that just posted on UberGizmo about the additional features: “Internet Explorer 8 Included In Windows 7 Beta”)

Nothing earthshaking and fairly solid for the most part. I closed IE down, shut down the machine (nothing new there either) and decided to come back to it a little later on and install Windows Live. One of the Microsoft bloggers recommended it as one of the first things you did on Windows 7 beta. As you’ll soon see, I now suspect that he’s a plant from Apple or the Free Software Foundation or someone else because that was going to be the last time I was able to do anything in this Windows 7 install other than logon. Forget about Azure. This is turning out to be a “cloud” of dust!

Shortly after Live installed, and I installed all of the services, I moved my mouse pointer down toward the Start menu and I got between it and the new taskbar (I’m still not sure why everyone seems to be raving about this feature. It’s okay I suppose but looks a little clunky for some reason) and that was it. Mouse froze. Keyboard froze. No hard disk activity. No 3 finger salute. Nada. Nothing. Zip. Holding the power button for 5 or 6 seconds did at least shut everything off.

I turned the PC on again, choose to boot into Safe Mode and see if I could tell what was amiss but Safe Mode started half on and half off of my monitor. I used the mouse (it worked in Safe Mode) to move the windows back into the viewing area and I looked to see if anything was obviously wrong with the mouse and keyboard drivers but everything looked fine. I restarted and as soon as I had logged in the mouse and keyboard locked up again. I shutdown via the power button again and went to retrieve another mouse and keyboard. I plugged those in and restarted. I got to login and you guessed it, locked up once again. Whatever was causing it happened sometime between the logon sequence and the operating system loading and populating the desktop. I could try and track down the issue or I could just reinstall.

I decided to go ahead and reinstall. It only took a short while the first time and other than the Live install I wasn’t going to lose anything. And as I kept telling myself, it is, after all, beta software. That’s why the betta fish is the default screen background I suspect.

That process went smoothly enough. I booted into XP, inserted the Windows 7 install DVD, I choose the second partition again, it saw the existing install and alerted me to the fact that I could find it in the Windows.old directory after the install. The install again took 12-15 minutes. I got a new Home Network key and I proceeded to download the Live installer again. This time though I was only going to install Live Writer. That went much better than the first time. I had full use of the mouse and keyboard afterwards. Live Writer seemed to worked well so I quit using it and went off to check email and RSS feeds on my Mac. When I got back to the PC the screen was blank and the hard drive was thrashing. I tried a couple of mouse clicks and keyboard presses to wake the screen up but all I got was “No video signal”. I detached the monitor cable and reattached it but still no picture and the hard drive was still thrashing. I decided to let whatever process had taken the machine hostage to have its way. I came back 30-45 minutes later. The hard drive had quit thrashing but still no monitor signal. I used the power button shutdown technique again. After restarting and logging in, I went and turned off the sleep options for the monitor and computer. I’ll manage those by hand for now. I played with Live Writer a little more, trashed the Windows.old directory, worked some with IE and Control Panel and generally have not encountered any more problems. And yes, it does seem quite a bit faster than Vista. I’ll get around to installing Office, Visual Studio and a few other apps and we’ll see how that goes and whether or not it’s still as peppy after that. I read somewhere this morning (sorry, I can’t find the link offhand) (Just found it: “CNET’s Reisinger: Windows 7 will push Apple’s Mac market share back down to pre-Vista levels”) that Windows 7 would start to take back some of the OS market share that Microsoft has been losing to Apple. After my experience these last two days I don’t think so. We’ll see though. There’s still betas and Release Candidates to go before 7 is out of the door. In the end though, it’s all about the user experience and Apple is still providing a better one.