For some, the Microsoft Store concept is a puzzle
The stores, now totaling seven, may be just about keeping the brand in the public consciousness, an analyst speculates. Unlike at the Apple stores, many of the products offered can be found elsewhere. Then there's the missing ‘cool’ factor.
Context & Ripple Effects
The store count has climbed from the 2009 leaked design with wall-sized screens and an Answers Bar to seven locations, including the deliberately Apple-adjacent Mall of America site opened in October. The framing question hasn't moved much either: a year ago coverage asked whether this was a cheap Apple Store rip-off, and now an analyst floats that the stores' real job is simply keeping the Microsoft brand in public view.
What makes the 'brand billboard' theory plausible is what's on the shelves — Windows PCs from multiple manufacturers, most of them available in every big-box electronics aisle, unlike Apple's exclusive hardware — plus the admitted absence of the destination-store pull Apple built its retail business on.
First-order effects
- Microsoft is running seven retail locations whose merchandise is largely undifferentiated from what Dell, HP and other partners sell everywhere else, so each store functions as a branding cost center rather than a channel with unique pull.
Second-order effects
- PC makers get a new showroom for their Windows hardware inside Microsoft's four walls, but also a partner-turned-competitor controlling how their machines are presented at retail; meanwhile Apple's store economics remain the benchmark every analyst grades the effort against.
Third-order effects
- If the brand-visibility rationale holds, Microsoft is normalizing retail as a marketing line item for a software company — a structure that only pays off if future hardware gives the stores something exclusive to anchor on.
The trend: PC-industry retail is converging on Apple's integrated hardware-software-store model, with Microsoft's copy forcing the question of whether experience retail works without exclusive products.