At the Mall with Apple and Microsoft

We've seen this before, but it seems worse now. On a winter's Saturday, a trip to the Natick Mall showed two very different retail experiences.

The Apple Store is lively with people of all ages. The further into the store you go, the more customers will you see, excitedly playing with, learning about, and buying stuff.

The Microsoft Store employees outnumber the customers. The liveliest place is not in the store, but out front, where a two-year-old girl is dancing to the big XBox video.

It's no wonder that Apple, with but a sliver of the desktop computing market share, is worth twice what Microsoft is worth.

The kind of support we've come to expect from Microsoft

So, as a part of an upcoming project, I go looking for information about supported version of Internet Explorer. I find the Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search page. Aside from a few products, mostly IE on the Mac, that have been discontinued, we are presented with this gem:

Releases known as Components follow the Support Lifecycle of their parent Major Product.

Much hunting later, I learn that IE8, although not the latest version, will be supported along with the rest of Windows 7, until 2020.
The same search tool shows that mainstream support for Vista and its components ended on two years ago (4/10/2012). Extended support will keep it around for another few years. This means no new features, but bug fixes will show up on patch Tuesdays for a while more.

Living and working in a tech news bubble

While the tech press is all tangled up with the upcoming Microsoft, Apple, and Google product announcements, it's time for for a marketing reality check. What are consumers generally hearing about these new products?

It turns out that the mainstream media isn't covering this and so, we can assume, most folks aren’t receiving much reason to get excited. Local newspapers and television stations and even a few national channels give only passing mention to topics such as the Microsoft Surface tablet, iPad Mini, or Nexus 7, or Windows 8.

I chose several Boston-area television and newspaper web sites along with a couple of national resources: WBZ (CBS), WCVB (ABC), and WHDH (NBC), Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Worcester Telegram (a nearby, mid-sized daily), CNN, PBS, and Fox News. For each site, I searched for articles with certain keywords in the title.

Note: I would have used Bing on IE for searching in an effort to replicate what a typical non-technical user might use. Bing, however, doesn’t support date-filtering of its search queries.

The Microsoft Surface tablet is a hot new product second only to Windows 8 in terms of company impact. The people who are cover Microsoft and Windows products for a living are having a hard time understanding, let alone explaining the difference between a Windows 8 tablet and a Windows RT tablet, both due for the release this week. The average news consumer is troubled by a surfeit of news to confuse. On average, people have been offered one story about the Surface in the past month. Most sites, in fact, hadn’t reported on the Surface after the June announcement and the recent scheduling of the product release.

The Nexus 7 is a fun product that's receiving a lot of good coverage in the trades. In our local media survey, however, only one site, the Boston Globe, had a story about Google’s breakout tablet.

Apple has an announcement scheduled for October 23. Most people who speculate about such things expect that we’ll learn about a 7-or-so-inch iPad that’s generally been called the iPad Mini.

Meanwhile, all of the chatter about the iPhone 5 hasn’t made clear just what Apple released. I sat with a person recently while an ad for the refreshed iPod line showed up on TV. Seeing the brightly colored bouncing devices, she asked, "Is that the new iPhone?"

Microsoft is betting the company on its radical redesign of the user interface in Windows 8. While the tech press has been covering each of the nooks and crannies, Windows 8 has received scant coverage in our press pool. We found an average of fewer than four stories in the last month. During the same period, the sites averaged more than 27 stories about Big Bird. CNN and the Boston Globe provided peak coverage while PBS, home of our faithful feathered friend, posted just one. After the spike following the October 3 debate, Big Bird’s gone back to quieter corners while Windows 8 coverage continues its slow climb.

The results for Windows phone, including the much anticipated Windows Phone 8 release, were too small to measure.

If you search the web for these products, you’ll find lots of coverage. Google news search provides a much higher return on tech news, so it’s not surprising that these terms are more visible in Google news sites. Most folks, however, aren’t searching for news about gadgets and software. Google Hot Trends shows the current topics in high demand. People are interested in sports, celebrities, and a few disasters and tragedies. Their lives are uncluttered by commentary about tech in general and new product releases, unless it’s something from Apple. Watch the trends in the days after Apple’s announcement.

For those of us in the tech marketing trades, it’s good to spend an afternoon with people who don’t give a damn about this stuff. It’s good to remember that, for people are buying these products, technology is a tool and not a goal.

 

About that new Microsoft Answers service

A report in  Ars Technica describes Microsoft's attempt to replicate Apple's Genius Bar by offering high-quality technical support for a Windows and Office products. Prices range from $49/hour for one-on-one online training up to $99 for two hours of virus removal, malware protection, or PC performance tuning. All of the services are handled remotely.

I'm relying on the Ars Technica article for this information because Microsoft, geniuses that they are, require that I agree to their terms of service before I can read their Frequently Asked Questions page.

[caption id="attachment_3020" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="(click to enbiggen)"][/caption]

Is Skype+Kinect magic worth $8B?

OK, this is a deal that I just don't understand. Microsoft is buying Skype for $8B. (At this writing, the deal hasn't been announced, so the purchase price is still speculative. I've seen the deal priced at up to $8.5B.)
Time was, $8B was real money. Now, it seems to be enough to say "Hey, we can still get headlines." Microsoft is trying to fend off investor and analyst complaints that it's stalled. A few months ago, it all but bought Nokia, paying the Finnish handset maker to come to its party.
Maybe it's a preemptive to keep Skype away from Facebook. Such a move might make sense if Microsoft had a social software strategy. Instead, it could wind up like Groove.
The only clever idea I've seen so far is that adding Microsoft's motion-detector game gadget Kinect to Skype would make some fun games and interactive communications. It could be cool, even magical.
If it was my money and I was looking for magic, I'd reopen Jack's Joke Shop and pocket the rest of the money.