Microsoft Expanding Its Retail Business: Next Stores In Denver And San Diego (MSFT, AAPL)
Microsoft's retail operations, launched last fall, are apparently doing well enough for the company to continue investing in more stores. Microsoft is preparing to open its next two stores in Denver and San Diego …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's retail entry has been an Apple-benchmark exercise from the start: the company announced in July 2009 that it would open stores near Apple's, then placed its first locations in Arizona and California malls per the fall 2009 site list, hired staff through a public JobsBlog recruiting drive, and documented the first openings with a TechCrunch 'mall invasion' photo in August 2009.
The April 2010 report that Denver and San Diego are next matters because it converts an experiment into a cadence — Silicon Alley Insider frames the expansion as evidence the stores are 'doing well enough' to keep funding, roughly six months after launch. That puts Microsoft on a measured build-out path while every prior step of the rollout was explicitly staged against Apple's retail playbook.
First-order effects
- Denver and San Diego become Microsoft's newest retail markets, extending a footprint that until now was concentrated in Arizona and California malls near Apple store locations.
Second-order effects
- Apple, whose store siting Microsoft has deliberately mirrored since the July 2009 announcement, faces a copycat format competing for the same mall real estate and walk-in upgrade buyers in each metro Microsoft enters.
Third-order effects
- If the build-out keeps pace, vendor-owned retail shifts from an Apple experiment to table stakes among consumer software-and-device companies, with mall landlords gaining a new class of anchor tenant bidding against traditional electronics retailers.
The trend: Consumer technology vendors are moving from selling through carriers and big-box retailers to owning their own mall storefronts, with Microsoft's store-by-store expansion tracking Apple's template city by city.