Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so Apple invented the idea of a store with flat tables and sales staff with blue shirts? First of all, practically every high end women's shoe or bag store had that "Art Gallery" presentation style: hardwood floors, uncluttered and spacious, simply flat tables or shelves with few products. Although the sales people are usually dressed very sharp.

But Apple did not invent this style of presenting consumer electronics. Sometimes I feel like Marco, MG, and Gruber were born 5 years ago. Am I the only one who bought nice, industrial designed stuff from stores like Bang and Olufsen? The Beocom 2 came out in 2002 and some of the Bang and Olufsen stores had flat tables like that. And if you visited some of the boutique stores in Italy or Japan even 10 years ago you would find some with this layout.

And didn't BestBuy invent the blue-shirt guy? I'm kind of bored of the continued notion that Apple was the first consumer electronics company to obsess over industrial design, build quality, or retail presentation.

There's a difference between tastefully selecting reference points from a wide range of inspiration sources, and crudely imitating a direct comptetitor who has heretofore been wiping the floor with you. The former is what Apple did when creating the Apple Store, and what every other successful designer does when creating something original. The latter is what wannabes do when they begin to realise how uncool they are.

Successfully repurposing ideas into fresh contexts is good work. This is not what Microsoft has done. Not by a long shot.

As to the Bang and Olufson argument, well, B&O sell speakers and is a nice company, but Apple sells the future of humanity and is the largest company in the world. It's a question of vision and impact, not who came up with hardwood floors first.

Come to think of it, the whole who-thought-of-it-first is a real red herring when thinking about why Apple/Apple Stores are significant.

So what?

Apparently from the various posts relating to discussions about Apple some people take the idea of others emulating Apple as a criminal offense, a type of offense in which for them is valid to point the fingers in the face of such companies and repeated yelling: "loser loser."

About your two last paragraphs I dislike this wording but it shows every mark of the fanboy speak, when given the facts that someone made some elements that Apple uses today just say how Apple is significant compared to them, it's the reverse of the above pattern. This is increasingly making me sick.

If the only thing MS can do is play catch up with Apple and even copy their store designs than they're truly losers.

Writing this from a Windows PC.

Apple aren't great because they invent everything from scratch. They're great because they are able to consistently identify the best ideas and combine them into something amazing.

Microsoft, on the other hand, seem to take a bunch of concepts at face value and mash them together without totally understanding them. Or perhaps in a company so large and distributed it's more a case of great ideas becoming corrupted over time. I don't know.

Look at Marco's photos of the Microsoft store. On the surface it looks like they did a good job. Look a little closer and you quickly see dumb decisions. For example, the "Windows 8" lettering on the floor they need a staff member to warn people not to step over. It's these mis-steps that undermine Microsoft and make them look like they're simply ripping off Apple Stores (and tablets) without really understanding what makes them awesome.

That's an important point. When Samsung or Microsoft take hints from what Apple do, many decry this as though Apple were never themselves inspired, and that's misinformed.

(others) -> Bang Olufsen, fashion boutiques -> Apple Stores -> Microsoft Stores -> (future)

This chain of inspiration is precisely what makes intellectual property very vague to reason about.

Meanwhile, it's probably also misinformed to say Microsoft or Samsung were not inspired by Apple. I don't think Microsoft were primarily influenced by Bang Olufsen stores. I don't think this is the direction they would have taken without Apple doing it before them.

I don't know if Macro is not seeing the picture clearly or if he's just miscommunicating. If he's saying that Apple was the original source of this store layout, that's silly. If he's trying to point out that Microsoft's decisions were largely a reaction to Apple's, he's not wrong.

You don't even have to go to the B&O stores, you can hit much closer to home with the computer set and Sony stores.

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