What does a PC guy think about the new Microsoft store?
October 29th, 2009, 4:22 pm · 35 Comments · posted by Tamara Chuang, a.k.a. The Gadgetress
Hi, I'm Ed
Gadgetress’ weekly Stump the PC Club answer guy Ed Schwartz ventured into the crowded new Microsoft store that opened in Mission Viejo today. We already know what Apple fanatics think about the store and we saw that many of the folks in line overnight were just waiting for the free rock concert (watch the opening video).
Now, Schwartz, he’s a loyal PC guy. I was curious to know what he thought about the store. He’s not anti-Apple, by the way. He admits to venturing inside the Apple store occasionally to see what’s new
Schwartz stopped by the large, bright store around 11:30 a.m. today because, “Oh, curiosity. That’s my thing. I just want to know what’s going on,” he said.
Plus, he said, any store’s first day is likely to be full staffed. He immediately went to find help to get some readers’ Windows 7 questions answered. This is where he learned the difference between the blue shirts and the red shirts. If you have a tech question, ask someone wearing a red shirt.
“It took me three employees before I found one who could confirm some Windows 7 questions. They all had blue shirts until I got to the guy with the red shirt,” he said.
Apparently, the red shirts work in the back and help out when tech questions get too hard.
Schwartz couldn’t help but compare the Microsoft store with the Apple store, starting with the shirts. There’s also Microsoft’s Answer Desk, which is very similar to Apple’s Genius Bar. Anyone can bring in their Zune or other Microsoft-related device and get help. There are also free lessons and there are special one-on-one sessions where for $99, you can get one hour of face time with a Microsoft expert every week for one year (that’s the same price as Apple’s One To One sessions).
He spotted laptops from HP, Dell and Lenovo, but that’s it. There were netbooks from Asus, Samsung and others, and all-in-one PCs from Sony. But what about Fujitsu, the brand he uses?
“I asked why not Fujitsu and all the smaller Asian PC makers? They told me that these are the ones people like the most,” he said.
A bummer of sorts. I had been hoping the Microsoft store would showcase every PC out there so potential users could touch, feel and see what else is out there beyond the big-name brands.
Overall, Schwartz enjoyed the Microsoft experience. He felt he was among fans who were actually buying stuff and not just waiting for freebies or free concert tickets to teeny-bop pop singer Justin Bieber. (By the way, the freebies were meh. Someone showed him a Microsoft water bottle and he snagged a Bing T-shirt.
The store is offering free PC tuneups for a limited time, regularly $49.) But the best thing: Computers were made to sell especially at the Microsoft store so they weren’t loaded down with unnecessary freeware.
“I can tell you what you can’t find at Best Buy that you can find here. You can buy a PC that has no trialware or crapware. They brag that our PCs are set up to go to work. You don’t have to download anything or add stuff. You won’t find 12 versions of McAfee on it. That’s a big deal. The average user may not even know all of that. A lot of people get a PC and don’t worry about all the extra stuff until it starts annoying them,” he said.
And he knows it well. Besides answering questions for our weekly “Stump the PC Club” column, Schwartz teaches computer classes and helps consumers fix their PCs. He said he often gets call from people saying, “What happened to Office on my computer?” The answer? They only had a 60-day trial version.
One nice feature all PCs purchased at the store include: Windows Security Essentials so there’s no need to install antivirus software.
Read reporter Niyaz Pirani’s earlier coverage of the new Microsoft store:
- 1,000-plus people crowd new Microsoft Store
- Photos from Day 1
- Who is in line at the Microsoft Store?
- Microsoft Store to debut Thursday
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Ha ha ha. Schwartz teaches a class to people on how to “fix” the PCs. I am on my 5th MAC, and I have never had one single occasion that it needed to be “fixed”. I have never had one single problem, nor have I ever experience one single problem ever, in over 20 years. What a riot. It is like buying a Ford Pinto that constantly needs its timing adjusted or it will not run… properly. You get what you pay for. I’d save my money, and get a REAL computer. Who would deliberately pay good money for a headache? PCs are piece of crap, and they don’t even try to hide it. Emperor’s new clothes….
Keep drinkin’ that Kool Aid, Bill.
all mac products are assembled in china and shipped from china. that’s a no…no for me. anywhere but china.
Wow, that’s arrogant. Spoken like a true Mac user. As if everyone’s needs were your needs.
As someone that grew up in Cupertino, I’ve used Apple as well as PC/IBM/Microsoft products for the past few decades. I like Macs and they certainly appeal to a goodly segment of the population.
But when it comes to MALE MAC USERS, as a generality, I’ve never seen a group of more consistently self-important individuals. They seem hellbent to justifying their existence everywhere they go and to anyone who will tolerate them while doing it in a narcissistic, know-it-all manner that naueates everyone.
You rarely see this level of vitriol from a female Mac user. I think it’s because they don’t care. They use Macs because they’re comfortable with them, it does the job they require it to do, and lets face it, they’re aesthetically pleasing.
But the male Mac user? They’re like the immature college chap that comes back from a semester at university and suddenly declares themselve “world wise” and “the man with all the answers”… the one with “their eyes wide open”. This loudmouth of course is also the walking embarrassment at family get-togethers that everyone rolls their eyes at. Case and point: This thread.
I don’t have a problem with Macs. They’re fine computers. I find that I have more of a problem with the guys that use them.
What? Isn’t funny that Microsoft has to COPY the looks of the Apple Store?
Not very creative….
Microsoft has been copying others’ ideas since they bought the DOS operating system back in the 80′s. They wait for the innovators to come up with a great idea and then either buy them out or copy it and try to overwhelm the original developer with millions of dollars of marketing. That has always worked for them with everyone but Apple.
I use WIndows because as an IT professional I have to due to their market share. But I haven’t bought a PC since 1996; I build my own. But I still buy Macs, starting with my first Mac SE back in 1988 and I prefer them due to the higher level of quality and personal enjoyment they provide.
I bet Bill Gates is still kicking himself for helping Apple back when they had problems before Steve Jobs came back. They’ve been getting their @ss kicked ever since.
The market leader and most successful entity is very rarely the creative/original one. People that take an idea and match it to the right customers the best, are the most successful. “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is all about this phenomenon.
AST, Compaq, Dell, & Packard Bell copied the personal computer from IBM. Now IBM’s not in the PC business.
Apple copied their look & feel from Xerox PARC. Now Xerox isn’t in the computer business. (At least not in any relevant way)
Sony copied… well… everyone. Despite recent hiccups, they’re still the market leader in most audio/video categories and have the strongest brand. Original innovators like RCA, Emerson, Zenith… all are gone.
I also don’t think Bill Gates is ‘kicking’ himself. Last I checked, he still has $40B and is still the richest man in the world. And besides, the survival of Apple was paramount to Microsoft separating itself from the DOJ trial. More importantly however, I think the existence of Apple is ultimately important to help continue to push Microsoft to think about relevant changes to their products to improve the state-of-the-art.
I really don’t think Microsoft is getting their “@ss kicked” by any stretch of the imagination. If you’re referring to changes in desktop/laptop marketshare, adoption rates, deltas in revenue or profitability… you’re just plain mistaken. Stating that Apple is”growing” in marketshare in any of these areas relative to Microsoft would be factually incorrect.
92.52% Windows (all versions)
5.27% Mac OS (all revs)
0.96% Linux (all distros)
(Stats taken from http://bit.ly/Jy1OY)
You’d be right if we were talking about iPod.
Go play with the user interface on the Zune HD for a good laugh, and you need another application outside of Windows Media to even use it?
Joke. This store will drive up sales at the Apple Store since people can now compare how bad the M$FT experience is relative to Apple.
Doesnt matter if microsoft copies apple or not. This is all WORKING. Microsoft is coming back mac fanboys. Its over.
Take it from someone who’s first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 back in the late 70′s; Microsoft will be around for some time, but Apple is gaining steadily and has always had better technology and always will. The only advantage Microsoft has is their market share (shrinking) and their deep pockets.
The vague use of the indefinite pronoun “I” as is “I was hoping …” notwithstanding, the no-show of various smaller manufacturers highlights a major difference between the PC school of thought and the Mac school.
The PC has always been a completely open platform… anybody can build a “compatable” machine with a wide range of off the shelf parts. Apple, on the other hand, has been pretty much a closed platform. There were rare exceptions, but you won’t find Mac ‘clones’ at your local Best Buy.
I’m convinced that a major issue with Windows machines has always been the effort to maintain maximum backwards compatability with both older hardward and software. That, and the industry’s efforts to marked PC’s like clock radios and trying to convince everybody that anybody can use their very own PC. ‘Taint True.
Look at the numbers: something like 90% of the personal computers are NOT Mac. I know a number of people who are switching to Mac since Mac switched to the “Intel” platform and they can run Windows on their Macs. I do have to hand it to the Apple folks, though: they took what is probably the very best operating system, Unix, and put a really pretty user interface on top! If only their keyboards were such cr*p!
I don’t know about Windows 7, but ask anyone that has ever developed for Microsoft about the millions of lines of extraneous and commented-out code in Windows 95 through Vista. They never clean up or optimize; they just keep plastering on new code like Bondo on a beater Chevy.
As the old programmer said, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
when you consider that MS is not standards compliant in terms of writing applications and websites, you have to actually break your code in order for certain websites to work on MS browsers. It’s draconian that they expect developers to wait around for them to upgrade their software. Technology moves fast and if MS can’t move that fast, they will be left behind.
Secondly, if any car company, drug company, entertainment company, etc., released a product that “mostly” worked, people would be furious! Consider a movie experience. You go buy your ticket, except before you watch the movie you have to pay a little more money for a seat that isn’t blocked, then pay a little more money for a view that would also provide sound, then when you finally do all that, the movie stops playing 3/4 of the way through and the film has to start over at the beginning…
You get the picture I think. Macs are not perfect, they are just a lot less difficult for regular people to sit down and work. The fact that a mostly good experience is even acceptable is just a sign that there was no effective competition for so long, MS got lazy. Now that people have choices some are seeing that the MS experience isn’t all that great.
My kingdom for a preview/editor! I MEANT to say older HARDWARE, not “hardward”. My bad! :>)
Remember PC Club ??
Not the pc club which gadgetress talks of North Orange County Computer Club.
Im talkin bout PC Club the store. That place was cool.
this should be an interesting war—let the games begin
I remember back in the early part of this decade how Steve Jobs pushed the PowerPC processor and called Intel CPUs slow as snails. He’d show the famous Photoshop Guassian Blur test with the fastest PowerPC Mac stacked up against some budget Celeron PC and tell his audience how much faster the Mac was. Well, guess what, he finally realized that Intel CPUs were faster and now they are in all Macintosh computers. Macs today are no better than PCs, just different. I’ve got two MacBook Pros in this household as well as a few Windows PCs. I watch TV on my Media Center PC in the kitchen, while I work. Can you do watch TV on a Mac? Well they got this device called the Apple TV, whereby you pay for and download reruns from the iTunes store and then watch those on your TV.
“Can you do watch TV on a Mac?”
yes, you can. without apple tv. frontrow, eyetv, miglia, pinnacle, to name a few.
Intel chips are much slower running Windows than the MacOS, because MS has never optimized their code; they just comment out the old stuff or replace it with new sub-routines. They have millions of lines of garbage code in Windows.
I’ve worked with both since the late 80′s and build my own PC’s and believe me, both the MacOS and the Mac hardware are much better in terms of quality, unless you buy a Windows system that costs as much or more than a Mac.
re: “they just comment out the old stuff or replace it with new sub-routines. They have millions of lines of garbage code in Windows.”
This reads as ignorant. ‘Commented out’ code is ignored by compilers as if it wasn’t there. Modern IDEs (integrated development environments) filter out commented lines. The code you call garbage exists to allow the next programmer that reads it to learn from without burdening the existing routine. Learning = GOOD. Mistakes aren’t repeated.
So your point is…?
Good artists copy, but great artists steal!
Just like with the GUI operating systems. Apple kept it locked up, with their MAC only, but Bill Gates made his version and sold it to the entire world to use on any machine they wanted to. Id say 90% market share is pretty darn good.
MACs are like government run health care. Great in theory, terrible in execution. Ever tried to use one? They’re a headache. I guess they fit the profile for photog/art/pikes place drinking elitists, but entirely unpractical and unuseful for everyone else. Dont forget priced 3-4 times as much as the equivalent PC, when the hardware on the inside is IDENTICAL to a PC.
If OSX and the mac experience is so phenomenol, why dont they release a PC comptible version? Yeah, the guys at OSX86 got it running, but its a headache.
Apple didnt get it, doesnt get it, will never get it.
apple gets it to the tune of $40 billion a year in sales. microsoft, with that 90% market share and all, has $48 billion a year in sales. apple has roughly 4% market share. since money talks and makes the world go ’round, i guess they did get it, do get it, and are getting it.
Apple’s money comes from hardware, including phones and mp3 players. Microsoft doesn’t sell computer hardware, stupid. If all Apple did was sell their OS they wouldn’t be a blip on the radar.
i see… just so i have this straight: an ipod is hardware, but a zune is not. and xbox is software.
i fail to see how your point is valid. apple does make hardware, so the fantasy world where they only make software doesn’t exist. both microsoft and apple are in business to make money. that is their objective. hbsince1980 said apple doesn’t get it and never has gotten it. but that just isn’t true. apple makes roughly the same annual revenue as microsoft, so either apple gets it or microsoft also doesn’t get it. and if microsoft’s main revenue source was their zune and xbox and not their OS, then they wouldn’t get it either? and that $48 billion that microsoft would make on their hardware would be worth less than the $40 billion that (remember we’re still in your fantasy world here) comes from apple’s software sales?
I wonder what percent of Apple revenue is from iTunes? They appear to sell gazillions of them at 99 cents a pop.
Just curious.
I expect that eventually their App Store will overtake iTunes interms of gross revenue. I’m reasonably certain that the developers selling their apps through the App Store are making more than the musicians are making from their songs on iTunes.
I disagree with the statement “priced 3-4 times as much as the equivalent PC”. From a hardware perspective, the difference between a Mac and those PC’s priced 3-4 times less is huge and an “equivalent” PC will cost about the same. The failure rate on components in the low-priced PC’s is substantially higher and the optimization provided by OSX is measurably greater. But I may revise the latter opinion after I’ve evaluated Windows 7.
apple = a PC in a shiny box.
Ipod = is really an mp3 player.
But keep it on the down low. I got some stock.
So do I; I bought it last year at under $60 per share. LOL
Me, my wife and 2 daughters 6 years old and 19 months, went to the opening of the MS store at about 10:20, there was about a 15 minute wait to get in. Personally, I was a little underwhelmed, but they did have some cool stuff there that the kids absolutely loved.
Like the Apple store, they had a station of 4 computers for the kids to play and check out children oriented games. There was a good selection for them to choose from and they were absolutely engaged with it. They also had a child accessible Microsoft Surface station. The really cool thing about it wasn’t just that the kids could carve pumpkins and manipulate images, it was that MS had a very enthusiastic employee right there in the midst playing with them and showing them all the cool features so they can really play.
I am not much into video games, but the Xbox area was hit. Three stations to play games on large video screens, I think this will be a continual attraction to the store that Apple cannot match.
The mobile phone section was almost useless. My iPhone was recently stolen so I went in to compare phones, since it was going to cost me 560.00 dollars for an iPhone replacement, I am probably not going to get another iPhone. They had a guy from Verizon, I think, in a suit immediately try to sell me one, but really he just annoyed me to the point of leaving. Granted, the purpose of the store is to sell me stuff, but the area just did not jive with the rest store. A big reason I bought the iPhone was that I went into their store and just played with it for about 30 minutes, pretty much undisturbed. There is plenty MS could do to improve this, first get rid of the suit. 2nd, make the phones easy and accessible enough to actually play with. 3rd, market the features more so we know how to play with it quickly. Seeing how MS sees this sector as a big growth opportunity and given their huge amount of competition, I am surprised by this oversight.
I also went in hoping to buy some accessories for my laptop, but the selection of 3rd party devices was anemic. The ones that they did have were just boxes on shelves, nothing demo-able. I will try again in a week when the store is less crowded. Maybe I just missed what I was looking for due to the crowds.
Overall, I think my kids are going to start asking to go to the MS store more than the Apple store, because they will be able to do more, computers games + xbox+MS surface vs Apple’s computer games.
Hopefully, MS understands that the key to their long term success is their store employees, yesterday, I met quite a few attentive, knowledgeable, enthusiastic employees. Its going to be tough to maintain that.
Once the Apple store reopens, its going to be great for the consumer seeing them go head to head.
Thanks for the insight Will. Yes, it will be interesting to revisit the store after the opening hype dies down.
I may have to visit myself if you can try out games; even at 55 years of age I still play video games, although I prefer the turn-based strategy games like Civilization IV over the 1st person “twitch” games.
But I still say that Macs are far superior to Windows-based systems, both from the OS and hardware perspective. We’ll see if my opinion holds up once I start putting Windows 7 through it’s paces. But as a long-time Unix sys admin, I’m going to be a very hard sell.
45yrs –
Yes, it’s really difficult to break away from “grep” and “tar” :>)
I remember the days when the largest seller of non-main frame *nix machines was Radio Shack (M12 and M16) running Xenix… from Microsoft! [hehe].
Apple did a great job putting an attractive User Interface on Unix!
There’s a tiny sliver of demographic, displayed in the posts above, who do this hilarious thing where they battle to the death over PC vs. Apple statistics. And then there’s the 99.85% of other Americans.
For the 99.85% of us who just want a computer to email and check the weather and read the newspaper and make an airline reservation, these new Microsoft stores will be a great thing. Just like the Apple Stores, they will be just as much about reaching out to consumers in a stylish, relaxing environment where they can play with the merchandise and ask a few questions of a nerdy but sweet college kid in a logo t-shirt.
But I agree with Will, Microsoft needs to kick out the smarmy cell phone salesmen and send them packing to those slimy kiosks in the middle of the mall staffed by spiky haired youths who you avoid making eye contact with. Microsoft shouldn’t let the slimy cell phone hucksters infect their sleek store.
If they sell PCs without pre-installed Crapware. It might be worth it. It’s unfair to compare Apple which controls hardware and software to PCs. If Microsoft can actually create the hardware/software package and control the experience, we can finally go head to head.