Microsoft is on to something with their "no bloatware" loads on systems they sell in store

I had a chance to go the new microsoft store in AZ this week. It's somewhat of a ripoff of an Apple store, but still a worthwhile effort.

One nice thing (in common with apple) is lots of computers to try and unlike say a best buy, they aren't so locked down you cant try anything.

The woman i was with wanted one of the new sony w netbooks and this mall also has the sony style store onsite as well.

Both stores had the unit which was an N280 atom with 250GB drive, 1GB RAM and windows 7 starter.

However, comparing the two was interesting. The unit in the sony store had almost 4GB of extra software loaded on it compared to the microsoft store. The unit in the sony store took almost twice as long to start compared to the unit at Microsoft.

Also shut down was noticeably quicker on the unit at the microsoft store.

Last but not least, we asked about upgrading the RAM on the unit. The Sony store told us it wasn't upgradeable. Microsoft told us that it was upgradeable to 2GB and that they would do it for free with purchase of the computer and the RAM (which was a reasonable $40).

She ended up buying the unit from the Microsoft store.

I came away fairly impressed by the experience and it will be intesring to see if these stores prosper in the medium and long term.

 

Apparently customer service is something companies have finally noticed

Nice experience.
One question though - sometimes you get pretty goo software with your laptops - e.g. My SZ came with installers for Photoshop Elements 6 and Adobe Acrobat Standard 8 (current at the time) - these were definitely useful.
And they consume space... as a installer - but can be useful.

But all the junk like Picasa preínstalled, Google desktop andwhat have not - all say to that is "good riddance".

 

Glad to hear this! I cant wait til they put one up next to the apple store in my mall. What brands did they show/sell? Any lenovo products?

edit: Never mind I found what they sell. shame they don't have any 17in models.

 

That's a good point. The load on her sony was pretty minimal, the OS, the sony supplied utilities for controlling the webcam, card reader and wireless card, and Microsoft Work 9.0

There was a shortcut to download the trial version of office 2007 but there was nothing actually installed.

On the unit at the sony store it had trial versions of norton, quickbooks,picasa, the trial version of office 2007 actually loaded and also the chrome browser.

It makes sense that Microsoft wouldn't want the chrome browser loaded

as to hardware they had a decent selection of brands (dell, lenovo, toshiba, sony, acer, alienware) grouped in to three catgories.

Basic- mostly netbooks
mainstream- regular laptops from 13 to 15 inch
multimedia/gaming- 17 inch models from toshiba, dell and alienware.

One interesting thing was they had a table of the dell adamo (the older model not the brand new xps)set up for $1499. I guess they were looking for some Mac style bling?

EDIT: one other comment. The crowd in the microsoft store skewed a lot older and more male than the apple store. There were some boys near the xbox section , but it was mostly adults in the store and i didn't see any teenage girls upadting their facebook page

 

This means Sony is getting worse

Let's hope MS is successful with their stores and moves them to Europe.