"You just had to know that the executives in Redmond looked at their own experience and also thought of the Gateway stores and laughed to themselves."
I got so tired of hearing the "Gateway already tried retail stores!" 'insight' back when Apple first opened stores. You could not buy a computer and take it home that day from a Gateway store. It wasn't a retail store - it was a showroom - there's a massive difference, and it was lost on pretty much every pundit at the time.
As for MS using retail stores as a big focus group, good on them. I would desperately like to see MS get more involved in creating better total end to end experiences for users; if that means by passing previous hardware partners and doing it themselves, so be it. I don't pretend MS wants to get more in to hardware, but we've seen with MS and with Android, when you let anyone put out your software on any hardware they want, you end up with a lot of bad experiences which ends up tarnishing the software brand more than the hardware brand.
I remember reading somewhere (here?) that Asus (or Acer?) wasn't too happy about MS getting in to the hardware tablet game. So what? What is Asus going to do? Stop selling Windows? They're not doing a great job in the tablet space anyway - 'lost sales' in that area won't be a big deal. And where are they going to go for an OS? Linux? Great! Let Asus/Acer/others start investing in Linux on laptops/desktops (finally).
I got so tired of hearing the "Gateway already tried retail stores!" 'insight' back when Apple first opened stores. You could not buy a computer and take it home that day from a Gateway store. It wasn't a retail store - it was a showroom - there's a massive difference, and it was lost on pretty much every pundit at the time.
As for MS using retail stores as a big focus group, good on them. I would desperately like to see MS get more involved in creating better total end to end experiences for users; if that means by passing previous hardware partners and doing it themselves, so be it. I don't pretend MS wants to get more in to hardware, but we've seen with MS and with Android, when you let anyone put out your software on any hardware they want, you end up with a lot of bad experiences which ends up tarnishing the software brand more than the hardware brand.
I remember reading somewhere (here?) that Asus (or Acer?) wasn't too happy about MS getting in to the hardware tablet game. So what? What is Asus going to do? Stop selling Windows? They're not doing a great job in the tablet space anyway - 'lost sales' in that area won't be a big deal. And where are they going to go for an OS? Linux? Great! Let Asus/Acer/others start investing in Linux on laptops/desktops (finally).