You Can Lose Your Mind, When Tech Stores Are Two of a Kind: Welcome to the Appl…Oops, Microsoft Store (The Video Proof)
by Kara Swisher
Posted on October 22, 2009 at 5:11 PM PT
A gauntlet of wildly cheering sales people dressed in brightly colored T-shirts, a sleek, white store, a simple but deceptively elegant design.
You will be excused for thinking this video below is from an Apple (AAPL) store. But, it is actually from the opening of a Microsoft (MSFT) Store in Scottsdale, Ariz., today.
It was the first retail outlet for the software giant to open, which will sell all kinds of hardware and software, with another debuting in Mission Viejo, Calif., next week.
It reminds me my favorite television show opening ditty:
Still, they’re cousins,
Identical cousins and you’ll find,
They laugh alike, they walk alike,
At times they even talk alike.
You can lose your mind,
When cousins are two of a kind.
Microsoft’s last foray into the retail space–a store called microsoftSF in San Francisco–was a failure and closed after two years in 2001, but this looks promising at least.
Here’s the video–done by someone who has clearly studied BoomTown’s shaky style carefully–which is on the Microsoft Store’s channel on Google (GOOG) video site YouTube.
Below it is a similar-looking video from the opening of an Apple store in Boston, Mass. last year (plus the genius opening of “The Patty Duke Show”):
Comments
It truly is sad. Pathetic actually. MSFT doesn’t seem to have any original ideas of their own. And I can hear it now… “Come on in for our Blue Screen Special” – poseurs!
Posted by Mike Lane at October 22nd, 2009 at 8:54 pmI still can’t believe this is real.
It’s amazing to see a company go to such lengths to avoid competing. The one store in the world that the Microsoft Store should not look like or remind us of is the Apple Store. Same way the one line that should never be in any Microsoft advertising is “I’m a PC”. They’re like a parrot! It’s incredible.
In 2001, Apple described their new stores as being a way for them to tell their own story. Now in 2009, Microsoft is using their new stores to tell the Apple story again. Why doesn’t Microsoft want to tell its own story? Because then 80% of the store would just be boxes of Windows XP and the other 20% would be dedicated to the botnet and virus gallery.
Posted by Fred Hamranhansenhansen at October 26th, 2009 at 6:48 pm