Homage to Red Dwarf
Subtitle really should have been "Android, everybody needs and Android"
Microsoft has revealed the location of its flagship UK store – just up the road from Apple's flamboyant, tree-lined Regent Street shop. The new store, which the company reportedly started scouting for back in 2015, will be at Oxford Circus, one of the most stressful places to visit busiest shopping areas in London. Microsoft …
> It also puts it just two minutes' walk – some might say pissing distance
Since this is a technical blog, shall we calculate the pressure required on one's bladder to piss the distance one can walk in two minutes?
We will assume that the walker and the pisser are the same individual, and that walking speed is limited by sheer number of other pedestrians. The pisser is at street level, the nozzle at average height.
For the sake of the sums, we shall ignore wind.
At Oxford Circus during rush hour, when the station is closed due to overcrowding, and everyone is queued up outside waiting for the gates to re-open, you can walk about 2 - 3 meters in two minutes. I would guess, but I'm obviously not an expert on the subject, that with the optimum aim angle, you could do that at normal bladder pressure.
1) Offer free gaming. Outcome: A very, very crowded shop full of every scruffy, smelly teenage tourist in town. All jostling, shouting and pushing to have a go on the latest Xbox.
2) Don't offer free gaming. Outcome: A clean, tidy, quiet shop with barely a single visitor each day. And even that visitor only went in because they thought it was the Apple store.
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Well, they have to do something to arract the punters... Oh wait, they might not actually sell anything....
Last year, I went to a Mall in Delaware. There was an Apple Store and a Microsoft Store.
The staff in the MS store outnumbered the customers and this was in the middle of a Saturday Afternoon.
Now, if they offered classes in how to remove their slurping from Windows 10 in ways that survived 'updates' I would think the place would be packed out for at least a few weeks at any rate.
If the offer gaming then how is that really an advert for MS? Gamers already know which games are on which platform so they'll go there for the game and buy it from wherever is cheapest in the Internet.
Which leads me to wonder what the income per sq ft of the new store will be. After all they are setting up shop in possibly the most expensive bit of retail real estate in the country.
There are two local (depending on how far you stretch 'local') Microsoft Stores: one in Boca Town Centre, on Glades Road, exit 45 on I-95 (base is off Southern Blvd, exit 68) and one in Aventura Mall, on Brickell Blvd, nearest I-95 exit is 16, Ives Dairy Road. (Yes, that's 52 miles from Southern...) in both cases there was an Apple Store at the mall before Microsoft showed up. (There are seven Apple Stores in the Dade-Broward-Palm Beach tri-county area: Dadeland Mall, Falls Road, and Aventura, in Dade; Galleria in Broward; and Boca Town Centre, Wellington Green, and Gardens in Palm Beach) In all cases the Apple Store has a lot to far too many customers, while the Microsoft stores have two to three staff per customer, and it's not as if they have a lot of staff. The Microsoft Store in Aventura is on the second level, less than ten meters from the nearest escalator down to the first level; the Apple Store is less than 100 meters from that escalator. The Apple Store is also roughly three times the size of the Microsoft Store and almost certainly makes more money for Microsoft in a month by selling MS Office for Mac than the Microsoft Store makes, total, in a year. The Microsoft Store at Boca is even smaller, less than a quarter the size of the Apple Store at Boca and I can't say for certain that they've actually made a sale. Ever. I suppose that they really must have, but you couldn't prove it by me. There used to be a Dell kiosk at Wellington Green less than fifty meters from the Apple Store; the three guys manning it were very, very, VERY lonely for about 18 months and then it was gone. The Microsoft Stores at Aventura and Boca are not only small, they're close to the food courts at both places... cheaper locations, because of the noise and smells from the food courts. Meanwhile, the Apple Store at Boca moved to larger accommodations, and the Apple Store at Gardens has captured one of its neighbors and is currently being 'expanded'. Apple's paying a lot of money for good locations and seems to be making it back. Microsoft's paying a lot of money for bad locations and looks to be losing much of it.
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"1) Offer free gaming"
Of course it will offer free gaming. No one is going to pay to play?!
"Outcome: A very, very crowded shop"
Easily resolved by a numbers limit / queuing / booking system, and a couple of heavies on the door...
"And even that visitor only went in because they thought it was the Apple store."
Or because they need a proper computer like a Surface Pro / Surface Studio...
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.. for the same reason there will probably be one in LA: plenty of cheap out of work actors (commonly referred to as waiters) so it's easy to hire a crowd for any event.
I lack the imagination to make the enormous leap of belief that there will be any other reason for there to ever be a crowd. Windows 11? Office NG? Not a chance. Maybe Xbox will draw some public, but that's about it.
Sadly, I can see this being some sort of a "success" in the sense of it not losing too many millions of pounds o year. The sort of clueless, glassy eyed zombie tourists who swarm down Oxford Street, lost in bewildered amazement at the amount of crap being offered for sale to them are surely ripe for stumbling into this place once they're sufficiently in enough of a trance.
Mind you, whether they have the desire and money to actually buy anything is another matter. I suspect that "flagship store" in pricey location really equates to "massive loss we can write off against tax".
tree-lined Regent Street ? there are no trees on regent street
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5122568,-0.1398527,3a,75y,301.89h,88.57t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sZSLP-eQHhezWbDMxuS8-7w!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DZSLP-eQHhezWbDMxuS8-7w%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D284.197%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656
If the queues for Oxford Circus Tube aren't bad enough, just remember you are in the physically dirtiest place on the planet. When BoJo was mayor he was always arguing with the Guardian about exactly how dirty Oxford Street was : NOT the dirtiest street on Earth but admittedly in the Top Ten.
These stores are just a "meeee tooooo" play by micro$oft. They aren't actually making any money. What are you going to go in there and buy? A windows phone? A broken Surface? The stores are a loss leader to keep micro$oft relevant in the eyes of consumers.
The truth is that to most consumers, micro$oft is the company that makes Windows, Office, and Xbox, and they're not really much of an interesting consumer brand.
About 4 or 5 years ago, there's a shopping center on the north end of Seattle that may have the first Microsoft store, to great fanfare. But, after the live band went away, it's an X-box and Surface store.
I care about neither.
Still had to mail-order that box of MS-SQL developer...