Can anything sell [sitting next to Zune]?
Redmond has already said it will build retail stores in proximity to the mothership’s own brick and mortar Apple Store locations. Now comes news that the man who helped create and implement Cupertino’s highly successful real estate strategy for retail is renting himself out to the software behemoth.
IfoAppleStore reports that George W. Blankenship, a 20-year real estate veteran at Gap, Inc. and one of Apple’s earliest retail employees, has signed on as a consultant to Microsoft’ nascent retail wing. Interestingly, the software giant said last week it would be shadowing Apple Store locations around the U.S. and here’s how, at least conceptually, they plan to do it.
Apple retail chief Ron Johnson, summed up the approach in a 2006 speech to investors:
If you want to enrich their lives, you can’t be in a parking lot, off a highway. You gotta be where they live their life. You gotta be right where they work, where they play, where they live, where they shop. The only way to enrich their life is to be part of their life. They’ve got to walk 10 feet to your store, not drive the car 10 miles. That’s what enriching lives would take.
At Apple, Blankenship was essentially the man on the ground implementing the company’s high-traffic, high-rent location retail strategy, which nearly every analyst said was doomed to utter failure. Given the strong affinity between Macs, iPods and now iPhones and educated people of means, the company’s approach should have seemed prescient.
However, equally prescient should be the notion that Microsoft schlepping (will they sell computers?) its usual steaming pile instead of HP or Best Buy schlepping the same steaming pile won’t make any difference—it’s the product, stupid. So, unlike Apple, which had great products and a huge pool of hungry, yet uninitiated customers, Microsoft’s facing exactly the opposite problem—experienced and wary customers who want something better.
Alternately, how meaningful does a product have to be to sit on a shelf next to a Zune and still sell? If the answer is an iPod or Mac, well…
What’s your take?
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July 22nd, 2009
I take it they can sell mice, keyboards, Zunes and all their software, have engineers and meeting rooms for their partners to utilize to pitch solutions to clients, maybe sell direct support and dispatch MCSE etc….
I realize the idea of having a full line of Accounting, Project Management, collaborative packages like SharePoint is hard to imagine when your entire Universe is the Desktop takes some effort.
Microsoft is a software company. Prior to the CompUsas and Best Buys you would find Computer Lands and Radio Shack Computer Centers etc… in the same areas the Apple Stores inhabit .
They did some retail, but the main use was having a place to demo and pitch deals with all the resources in one place and is a hell of a lot more efficient than loading up a bunch of people and a projector and writing down questions to “get back to you”. Or relying on some blue shirted minimum wage drone.
Microsoft already has millions of square feet of retail space in every office supply, large retailer and software store.
Limiting your thinking to having them slavishly copying Apple by selling actual computers, which will have all kinds of left out screaming lawsuit in hand hardware manufacturers climbing up their ass, is all very Machead. But Microsoft has many areas of business Apple is unable compete in because they don’t offer product that fits.
Microsoft doesn’t build computers.
Think Different.
July 24th, 2009
Your title doesn’t make sense at all. I bet you have never used a Zune. I have a Zune 120 and for me it’s the best mp3-player I could imagine.
You iLuvers should be thankfull to Microsoft for creating the Zune brand, because let’s be hounest, the competition againt iPods was weak at the moment Zune launched. Zune brought price cuts to the iPods and more competition brings better products. You’ll see that Apple will start selling their iPod touches for less if the Zune HD would have lower prices. It would be good, both for Apple and Microsoft if Zune had some more marketshare, it would bring us better products and lower prices. By laughing at Zune and by letting the world think Zune sucks, you shoot in your own legs.