Apple stores, even if they exist mainly to promote the brand, are MASSIVELY profitable. In fact, they are one of the most profitable store chains in the world. By contract, I believe that Microsoft was always running most of their stores at a loss. Even for a massive company like Microsoft, continuously running an unprofitable division is hard to maintain.
We have a "high-end" Simon mall, in a town near where I live. It's quite "upscale," with Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdales, etc.
It has an Apple Store near the South entrance, and a Microsoft Store, near the center.
The Apple Store is always packed. I haven't been there in a few months, so I have no idea what's going on with it at the moment, but it has always been jammed, when I have gone there; even at early or late hours. I have never found a time when it is not crowded.
The Microsoft Store, on the other hand, usually has more staff than customers, with the staff playing XBox in the sitting area outside the store.
EDIT: Yes, everyone, I understand the marketing and lifetime-value reasons for doing that. I'm just questioning the value of comparing crowd sizes as a direct measure of relative instantaneous revenue/success.
I think that every one of them becomes a customer, eventually. Many of them become evangelists, which can sometimes be even more valuable.
There were--cough--a number of teenagers hanging around like groupies. One of them--cough--may even have installed their heavily customized SuperStarTrek game, and had it become the store's favourite demo.
It doesn't really matter, though, because as the OP pointed out, Apple Stores are massively profitable. This is well known in retail circles.
Landlords fall all over themselves to get Apple Stores. Real estate developers will include Apple Stores, or Apple Store lookalikes in their renderings even before the buildings are built, just to get people interested in their projects.
Microsoft set up a lot of stores in the same malls as Apple Stores. This disparity in numbers has always been the case, no matter how good the MS experience has been as others have pointed out. Seems Apple learned their lessons from the first time the battled Microsoft. Consumers don't do as deep of a research as the tech crowd thinks.
Crowds may be anecdotal, but the crowds clearly do translate into revenue for Apple.
The link spells out revenue per square foot for Apple as $5546, vs an average of $325. Second and third places bring in $3721 and $2951 per square foot.
[0] https://chainstoreage.com/news/most-profitable-retailers-sal...
Like I'm sure that's what the point was. Someone would go try some Macs out at the Apple store and walk past the Microsoft store on the way to their car. They'd go in, check out the goods (as a matter of comparison shopping), and possibly buy a PC instead.
In my experience though, post-iPhone, very few people go to Apple stores to buy computers. Sure, that's still probably a lot of people, but 99.99% of the people in the store seem to be there about an iPhone (half the time, an iphone that they broke and expect to be fixed under warranty lol).
MS was in the business of selling phones for a while. I wonder if their stores lost traffic because they don't do phones anymore.
This proved a correct thesis for the apple store, and then the stores grew as apple built mass market products.
Microsoft’s product lineup does fairly well. But it is not mass market. And while they are different from PCs, they still run Windows, which is widely familiar among laptop buyers. Further, retail is less important a channel than it used to be. Microsoft can market its products directly online. So even if Microsoft has some of the disAdvantages Apple had, it doesn’t really have the full use case.
It took far more than that to earn the trust of consumers. Microsoft decided to sit back, collect rent on Windows/Office, and let other business do the hard work of customer service and let their customers deal with malware on their laptops.
Contrast with Apple, who put customer service front and center, opened stores that my parents could go to and talk to someone if they had a problem. They took ownership of the product. And now they are rewarded with the profits.
Microsoft had all the cash in the world to make it happen. But instead, they put Candy Crush in the start menu.
And got rid of Pinball. :(
they're an OS developer and they can't spend a day figuring out a floating point bug?
maybe redirect some of the time integrating Candy Crush
> they're an OS developer and they can't spend a day figuring out a floating point bug?
Maybe it’s bad to argue by appeal to authority, but I take Raymond Chen’s side that it was a hard problem to debug in the time available over some internet sneering that it must have been easy, any day.
Well they haven't ported it in the decade since.
> in the time available
Same response.
> Hey everybody asking that the source code be released: The source code was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them.
OK, which company?
They upped their game with the built in Windows Defender to the point where you don’t need third party AV because it’s rated so highly.
> Contrast with Apple, who put customer service front and center, opened stores that my parents could go to and talk to someone if they had a problem.
Like all the retail stores Microsoft opened, which people in this thread are saying provided a really good experience?
> Microsoft had all the cash in the world to make it happen. But instead, they put Candy Crush in the start menu.
Contrast with Apple who put sponsored results in the App Store and prevent you from deleting default apps in macOS Catalina? https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/dfetr4/comment/f32q81e
Weak take. Microsoft was very active with numerous mobile offerings -- Pen Computing, Windows Mobile, Tablet and Embedded Windows. You can debate why they ultimately failed -- too early, insufficient hardware, too Windows-centric -- but @billg was never content just "collecting rent" and not innovating, especially in mobile, internet, and connectivity.
Your bias is obvious when you describe MSFT as "collecting rent" (negative connotation) and AAPL as "rewarded with profits" (positive).
Even on the business side, Microsoft never understood or cared about their users (besides maybe Word and Excel users), and marketed towards CEOs and COMPANIES.
see: Sharepoint which is the most financially successful Microsoft product ever, yet every end user despises it.
They never tried or cared to work backwards from a consumer user or what they wanted, they just started from "how do we make billions of dollars from licensing fees".
Yes, the Genius Bars are just fantastic! You make an appointment and then you get help from someone knowledgeable, in person, for free. And that person is authorized to accept repairs, etc.
The Big Idea of the Genius Bar is that it's there to help. It's not there to upsell like Geek Squad. It's not hoping you'll go away like typical CS reps. Its mandate really does seem to be "make Apple customers happy."
https://chainstoreage.com/news/most-profitable-retailers-sal....
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/29/here-are-the-retailers-that-...
The “family room” employees now make up most of the Apple Store staff. One can buy an iPhone anywhere, but same-day service to fix that iPhone is more limited. I mean, where would you go?
The cost of payroll for Geniuses, Technical Specialists, Genius Admins, and Trainers, is quite a bit higher than for sales staff - higher pay and the larger headcount of the department. Because of this, any profit from the sales side is absorbed by the tremendous cost of operating their service business.