Shoppers fill Microsoft's new store in Boston.
(Credit: Jim Kerstetter/CNET)
BOSTON -- OK, so Microsoft impressed me.
Microsoft opened its first local retail store here this morning. It's in the upscale Prudential Center in the city's equally upscale Back Bay. It also happens to be across the street from a very large and very sleek Apple store -- a common occurrence, it seems, for locations of new Microsoft stores.
Here's what I expected to write about the new Microsoft Store: A somewhat snarky but data-driven piece on Microsoft aping Apple's retail strategy and how it shows the desperation of this once-mighty company. I expected to say this store was a cheap knockoff of Apple's giant, multi-story place across the street. Black velvet Elvis paintings, Formica counters? I dunno. My expectations were not high.
I also expected to mention that last week I sat in on an engineers' meeting at a local cloud-computing startup called Acquia, and was stunned to see that every one of the 30 or so people in the room was working on a Mac. When even the most hardcore of developers are working on Macs, it's a bad a sign for Microsoft. That's the kind of ecosystem, once established, that can take years to break. And Microsoft certainly knows a thing or two about courting developers an... [Read more]
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