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'm sure it's great for the bottom line, but is the ultimate goal to only be competing with Google and AWS on who can run the cheapest Linux VMs in the cloud ?
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 electronic goods store or online. I suspect the theoretical opportunity was really a mirage and never really there.
While I agree with your premise, I think that the availability of a store is a form of goodwill. You are given more confidence in a product if you know there's a place where you can go when things go wrong, or if you want to see something for real, and not just rely on some rendered image on a screen.
There's an Apple Store a few blocks from me. I've never been there. But I like knowing I have the option.
> 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.
But is it actually serving a purpose if not enough people are actually going into the stores, at the demos and playing with the toys?
I don't think this is abandoning consumer tech. Their ~90% domination is still a thing. They gained it without stores, and the stores weren't helping them maintain it.
There seems to be this cognitive lag where it seems like the stores should be a big deal, should be significant, giving them up should say something about Microsoft's position in the industry. A lot of commentary can't shake that perception. The reality though is it never was any of those things.
I think that an interesting part of that lag is directly Windows Phone related. Phones seem to be the one consumer hardware product that customers "demand" a store to exist. Look at the retail landscape, other than big box electronics stores and office stores and Wal-Mart/Target, who is selling consumer electronics physically? There's a lot of strip malls packed with phone stores. People that want PC laptops/desktops mostly buy directly from OEMs on their websites. People that want Xboxes or PlayStations are fine grabbing it at Target, but more likely Amazon today.
Phones for various reasons (and a lot of them are phone carrier bureaucracy related, I would imagine) "need" that extra bit of handholding, that service relationship when buying one. Even Apple Stores, the vast majority of the store space is devoted to phone sales and services and laptops/desktops an after-thought. If you hear of lines and busy days of Apple Stores, it is almost exclusively phones.
Microsoft created their Stores just too many months too late to save the Windows Phone after the main US carriers decided 3 OSes was one too many options to carry in their own stores. Once Microsoft Stores were no longer selling Phones they always had less reason to exist, mostly existed already as either Xbox Experiences or shadow versions of (for instance) Best Buy's Surface section, without the rewards/brand loyalty of something like Best Buy.
Haven't really been a console person for a long while... That said, I pretty much favor big-box stores for a few different items namely game consoles, televisions and monitors. It's likely just my own anecdotal bias here, but I've had more of these die in the first month of use than any other electronics, and having a place I can go to "now" to get it replaced is usually a huge deal.
When the first X-box came out, the first one died within an hour of use... the second in about two days, the third is still running (or was last time I looked at it). 1/3 of TVs or Monitors I've mail ordered have been doa or didn't make it a month.
In the end, I really do hope some of them survive as there's something to be said for not mail order. Costco is usually really decent, and Best Buy is sometimes really frustrating, but I like having some options even if I don't like buying in person and would prefer mail order.
Anecdotally I'm in a similar place. I believe that Amazon's electronics "department" is little better than eBay these days and the amount of digging just keeps increasing that you need to do to figure out who is actually selling the device, what their business model is, and if you can trust their listing. (Are they a warehouse arbitrage just moving stuff from Wal-Mart/Target/Costco/etc around, based on who has the highest current price? Are they a nearly defunct old Mom & Pop shop whose only livelihood is now an Amazon and/or eBay shingle? Are they a refurbisher shop that has the gall to label "like new" items as "new" because Amazon's algorithms and mechanical turks haven't caught them yet? Etc.)
That said, I've been charged with being weirdly "old school" that I'd often rather pay extra at Best Buy than just order it for cheap on Amazon. (I've needed to replace a PC monitor since March, but keep procrastinating it because I don't want to buy it online.)
I mostly only buy if Amazon is the seller... at least returns are pretty consistent that way, though still subject to mingling. Same goes for using newegg... was really sad when newegg added 3rd party sellers, it muddied the site.
Thing to watch out for is that Amazon often is the shipper but not the seller and some of Amazon's greedier dark patterns make it tough sometimes to notice that a product that looks sold by Amazon just means it is shipped by Amazon. (It's one of the UX things were they have to be clear about it but are fighting themselves with how clear to be. Both phrases "sold by" and "shipped by" start with "s" end with "by" and you certainly have to imagine Amazon counts on you skimming the middle parts in some of their UI layouts.) Outside of "Amazon Basics" brand products, Amazon directly sells almost no electronics, from my anecdata, but they certainly ship for a large percentage of their 3rd party sellers (because of course they do, that's the easiest way to make items Prime Eligible and thus further their Amazon SEO quotients).
Though Amazon can be credited that they are consistent with returns in "shipped by" products as much as they are with "sold by" products. At least there their attempts at confusing the marketplace means they hold up some standards universally as well.
I'm pretty careful about that... I will almost always only order if Amazon (or the mfg) is the seller... and even then, I still favor Amazon (mostly for return hassles).
> Phones for various reasons (and a lot of them are phone carrier bureaucracy related, I would imagine)
IMHO the real issue is the size of the audience. Phones get sold to people who would never buy a computer, "non-technicals" to a level that desktops and laptops never really touched.
These folks 1) need a lot of help choosing what to buy, 2) have a relationship with these items that is not driven by tech specs but by "feels", 3) buy stuff primarily in shops, not from websites.
I think the "retail demand" for phones is closely connected to phone repairs. Unlike a computer, a phone is carried around every day and has a much higher chance to break. Customers depend heavily on it, so they are not willing to send phones to repair centers and wait weeks for a return.
In Canada, retail phone stores are kind of an artificial construct. There are only three large national carriers, but they all have multiple flanker brands and subsidiaries, so a mall will frequently have seven or eight phone stores by the same three companies in order to carpet bomb consumer consciousness. This isn't useful for consumers in any way - they're effectively just paying for redundant staff and infrastructure via inflated monthly plan prices.
It's about presence and exposure. For people (like me) who use mostly Apple products and block ads on the internet, the Microsoft products aren't really on my mind. Having a store close by that I can visit certainly increases exposure to these products.
It's surprising how my own attitude changes depending on if it's online: if I see an ad for Microsoft or other brands on the Internet, I'd feel irate and start to wonder why my ad blocker stopped working. But if I see a Microsoft store taking up thousands of square feet, I don't mind its presence and would totally check it out if I am not busy.
I used to check out the Surfaces as I walked by the windows of that store and for a while considered buying one. I didn't but it did have a (mildly) positive on my perception of MS while I lived in SF.
Was it low traffic or low sales traffic? Helpdesk traffic is unlikely to drive much in terms of immediate sales, but establishing a good helpdesk that can be trusted is very key to trust in the brand. And helpdesk is usually a get in, drop your laptop off, get out and pick it up later type of thing.
Agreed. I had a great walk in help desk experience with resetting a Surface. I otherwise like the Surface, but, if you search online, you can see some models seem to have an intermittant mystery power up glitch. Knowing there was a store a few minutes away that could reset the device would give me confidence to purchase another one without hesitation.
"Same with the SF Westfield Center store. Great staff. It was a good place to check out various Surfaces in person as well."
Agreed - about that specific store. However, I must reflect that after years of going there with my children, we spent exactly zero dollars there.
We had fun and played video games and hung out and futzed around with various "exotic" computing devices from MS ... and we never had any intention of buying anything.
I always got the impression the schools were like after-school daycare for kids. A lot of the demo computers as well as the demo XBoxes were always full of kids playing Minecraft, Overwatch, etc. The other ones might have kids watching Youtube or Twitch (never Mixer) of the same types of games.
> 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.
Exactly my experience last I visited. It seemed like the goal of the stores was misconceived from the start... like the purpose was to coax Surface into being a successful product, rather than build up a real store business of its own.
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'm sure it's great for the bottom line, but is the ultimate goal to only be competing with Google and AWS on who can run the cheapest Linux VMs in the cloud ?