Microsoft to close its 83 retail stores

[stopbush]

Employees are being offered the opportunity to work at their online store.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/26/tech/microsoft-stores-closing/index.html

[Zorro]

1. It was a lousy concept to begin with

Microsoft is predominantly a software enterprise. Apple has the hardware products.

[Brother Buzz]

2. The physical stores generated negligible retail revenue for MSFT

"Our sales have grown online as our product portfolio has evolved to largely digital offerings, and our talented team has proven success serving customers beyond any physical location," said Microsoft corporate vice president David Porter.

[stopbush]

3. Up until this week, my son was working at the #2 MS store in the country.

A few weeks ago he was approached by a customer who runs a local company that beta tests software. He took a salaried position with them. Looks like he got out just in time.

He had been working at home for the MS online store since March. He liked his time at MS (over three years), but the chance to get out of retail was a powerful incentive for him.

Glad he made the move.

[PoliticAverse]

4. Oh noes, where will people get their Zunes?! n/t

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. I remember when they were new, but they've dropped off the face of the Earth.

I never saw one at a yard sale. Not that we have them anymore either.

[Initech]

5. Probably a good move right now.

I bought my Surface at a Microsoft Store, I think I was one of the few in there at the time.

[Jirel]

7. Awesome.

It's not like anyone was going there anyway.

Seriously, in a mall with an Apple and Microsoft store that's closest to me, the two stores are almost exactly across the courtyard from each other. The Apple Store is almost always full, sometimes annoyingly so. The Microsoft store usually has more workers than customers. It's hilarious.

[stopbush]

8. My son's experience at his MS Store was that while there were fewer

customers than at the Apple store, those customers at the MS Store were often there to make bulk purchases of computers, laptops and software for their businesses, whereas the Apple Store crowd consists basically of lots of customers looking to buy a single phone.

The other thing they dealt with on a daily basis was Apple customers coming in who had purchased a Microsoft app for their computer/device and who had found to their dismay that the kids at the Apple Store had no interest in helping them with any problems they might be having with said MS app. My son always helped them out, even though it rarely translated into a purchase at the MS store. It became something of a joke, with the Apple employees telling their customers to head down to the MS Store a few doors down in the mall to get the help they needed.

[hunter]

9. Microsoft and Apple are sand in the bearings of human progress.

Let us not mourn them.

[stopbush]

10. Ridiculous, and ultimately, meaningless.

[hunter]

11. Nevertheless I am a very hard core Linux guy.

The first real operating system I made myself familiar with, beyond the punched card JCL stuff, was BSD.

Before that I wrote FORTRAN on punched cards and will always praise my mom for insisting I learn to type in middle school. Some of my college classmates in those engineering classes, all guys, hired women to type.

I was in the lab when 2BSD was released into the wild. That was one of the most magical moments of my life, beyond comparison, until I met my wife.

I first logged onto Democratic Underground with a highly hacked and customized version of Windows 98SE and Opera.

When I switched to Debian it was like coming home again. A lot of my old BSD stuff "just worked." Warts and all.

The oldest files on my desktops date back to the 'seventies.

I've got most of the computers I've ever built or used emulated on my desktop, one click away. If I want to play Pengo like it's 1983 I can do that.

I'm posting this reply from a Chromebook you could buy on Amazon for $89 right now.

My Big Iron Lenovo machines have never cost me much more than that, but I have to plug them in. I fucking loathe my desktop computers. I associate them with work.

[Silent3]

12. Linux is great for techies, or non-techies with simple needs...

...but it still falls a bit short in the user-friendliness department for the average person.

It's come a long way, no doubt, in recent years, getting pretty slick in some ways, but I find I can still only get so far before I have to open up a terminal, or edit some config file, in order to get stuff done.

I'm pretty happy with MacOS myself. I do, however, have a remote headless server running Linux, and at home I run Linux on an Ubuntu virtual machine that I use for compatibility testing now and then.

With developer tools installed, and Homebrew too, I can geek out on the command line when I need to in a very Linux-y way on my Mac.

Oh, I should add... while I don't keep too much retro stuff around, I do have a virtual Apple IIe, and can still run software that I wrote in high school back in the late 70s.

[hunter]

14. What are you talking about?

Everyone with an Android phone or Chromebook is using Linux. Everyone with an Apple desktop machine is using BSD.

Microsoft is playing a game of catch-up, more so now that Apple has decided to abandon x86 machines.

[Silent3]

15. I'm talking about OSes openly billing themselves as "Linux"...

...not OSes built with Linux (or something Linux-like) at the core, since you specifically called out Apple as well as Microsoft. (Also BSD isn't Linux, it's a flavor of Unix.)

And while the market has certainly shifted toward mobile devices for much consumer use, Apple is hardly "abandoning" x86 machines.

[hunter]

17. Sorry. Apple is quitting x86 for ARM.

Just as they quit 6502, 65C816, 68x00, PowerPC...

Your fancy Apple x86 desktop machine is obsolete but it will make an excellent Linux box.

[Silent3]

19. Not at any rate of speed to make me worry

I'll get plenty of use out of my current hardware well before it becomes obsolete. It's not like I try to hang on to computers for 20 years -- or that Apple becomes "sand in the bearings" for not supporting hardware for that long.

[Renew Deal]

13. Absurd and untrue

[hunter]

16. Please explain...

If you are that invested in Microsoft or Apple then this Open Source stuff should be easy for you.

I love my Chromebooks. No, I am not an Alphabet guy.

All I've ever done is write a few bits of code and kicked a few people who were threatening to make me a millionaire in the balls just before I ran away.

Doctor Who taught me well.

RUN!

[Renew Deal]

18. Both companies have positively impacted humanity with their products, despite their flaws.

Last edited Fri Jun 26, 2020, 09:33 PM - Edit history (1)

Both have given us tools that have closed communication gaps, created new avenues for creativity, educated billions, and transformed our worlds mostly for the better. Both have had their products used in medicine, space travel, and even simple kiosks. It is impossible to deny their positive impact on humanity. Open source has a role too.

It might be a matter of perspective, but I see their products as enabling humanity. Even their competitive squabbles have generally worked in our favor. I'm sure we can find examples of both making mistakes, but their track record is positive overall.

[Silent3]

20. Even Linux wouldn't have come as far as it has...

...if it weren't trying to imitate the leaps and bounds made in user-friendly interfaces by Apple (and maybe a little bit by Microsoft too ).

[hunter]

21. I'm not hugely invested in this argument...

... beyond saying that Gates and Jobs knew jack shit about computing but they were sharks in the ocean of business.

It's an utterly bizarre quirk of history that the World Wide Web was born on a NeXT computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

I first logged onto the internet in the late 'seventies and was among the first anonymous users.

Yes there are naked pics. I did not post these pictures there myself, in all their dithered glory, but damn I was HOT! If you find these pics feel free to post them here.

I'm more embarrassed by some of the stuff I was writing back then.

Hell, there's plenty of things I've posted here on DU since 2002 that now embarrass me.