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This is a real shame. We have (had?) a Microsoft Store in the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham), and my visits to that store were always really enjoyable. I made sever

This is a real shame. We have (had?) a Microsoft Store in the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham), and my visits to that store were always really enjoyable. I made several warranty claims in-store, and they went above and beyond to help me out, even when my grounds for a claim were kinda shaky. Microsoft did a really good job of hiring diverse talent, and every store-clerk I ever interacted with was smart, nice, and seemed to genuinely care about fixing your issue. Throughout the day, they held tech demos and video game competitions, and all the kids I saw in the store always seemed to be enjoying themselves. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a kid visiting the Microsoft store in the mall was inspired to learn more about computers and technology based on their experience. This sucks.

xphilter 6y ago
I agree, but I kinda feel like the relaxed and comfortable atmosphere was more of an indication that the stores weren’t doing so hot. Every time I went to one is was because it was quieter and lower key than other stores. And I never actually wanted to buy things. Maybe that’s good(ish) marketing but probably doesn’t make good business sense.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Being able to inspect hardware before buying is a good idea, even if you do put the order in online.
- sterwill 6y ago
  That may be the case. I rarely go inside my local mall (Southpoint, Durham NC), but on sunny weekends the Apple store was often jam-packed with people. So busy that customers had a hard time getting through the door. Sales people talking non-stop and processing orders as fast as possible. There was a Microsoft store inside the main mall building, just a few minutes away. I walked by it a few times, but it was usually empty.
  - dkdk8283 6y ago
    South point Apple has always been painful - I avoided it like the plague. I think it’s the only store in the area besides Charlotte.
    - vtbassmatt 6y ago
      Crabtree has one too. It's just as crowded and awful.
  - nonrecursive 6y ago
    Good god the Southpoint Apple store is terrible. I went there once because I wanted to buy a new iPad and apple pencil so I could participate in a digital painting workshop the next day, and they wanted me to wait 45 minutes before they would help me. I said that I wasn't going to wait that long and hopefully wasn't an asshole about it (it's never cool to be a jerk to retail employees!) and they did manage to ring me up within about 5 minutes. The experience was just so weirdly baffling and frustrating and I've since avoided the place. I realize this sounds like the height of American consumer entitlement but it was truly bizarre that the response to "Hi I would like to hand you more than $1,200" was "please wait 45 minutes." Then there was also the confusion about who to actually to talk to in the first place if you wanted to buy something. Do I talk to the person at the door? Nope, because I don't have an appointment. I should just stand in a corner and hope someone finally talks to me. It was truly amazing that Apple could so thoroughly botch the experience of exchanging money for goods.
    - jedieaston 6y ago
      I had a similar experience a couple years ago with a $2k MacBook Pro, except they did the whole spiel. “No, please! I want to give you money. Can I please give you money now?”
    - tracker1 6y ago
      I've had a couple decent experiences in the Apple store in Chandler, AZ mall. First was a battery replacement in-warranty, second was a pickup, then a return/exchange. The battery replacement did take longer than I would have preferred about half an hour, but not bad in general. A few years later, I got a mid-2014 rmbp, and didn't know they'd soldered on the RAM and that the storage wasn't upgradeable... wound up forking over for a top end model. Of course with each progressive release being a little more cumbersome, and never really liking iOS devices. Some of the security locks that you can't turn off (enabled 2fa then sold off one of my two devices, don't know how the 2fa code got delivered to the device I was trying to re-log into, but was lucky in the end). I gifted my last mbp this past xmas, and haven't looked back. I am mostly on my desktop or work issued laptop now. Hoping to see an upper-mid to high-end Ryzen model with at least 64gb ram and at least an RTX 2070 level gpu. All the current gen Ryzen laptops are seriously gimped in one way or another.
- pkulak 6y ago
  That's a good point. I hate going to the Apple store because you pretty much have to get in line behind a dozen other people for the privilege of buying a $1000 phone or $2500 laptop. The Microsoft store down the block was always super chill by comparison...
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  I mean, these were obviously set up as a (marketing) counterpoint to the Apple stores, but Apple stores aren't just marketing. In any given mall, Apple stores usually have the highest revenue per square foot - they even beat out the jewelry stores. Microsoft was never going to be able to sell enough surface tables and xboxes for this to be viable long-term.
  - bobsil1 6y ago
    Agree. MS is mainly an OEM and enterprise co focused on TCO, etc. over consumer polish.
mc32 6y ago
I wish announcements were more straightforward. I’m looking at their announcement but can’t figure out what they mean by: “...We will continue to co-locate engineering, sales, support, envisioning centers, executive briefing centers, and retail spaces for maximum impact for our customers and our company.” What does that actually mean in real terms?
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  They will keep a support team (not just salespeople) near big customers where it would be better to employ people locally compared to having to send support staff from Redmond each time a customer has a problem.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Probably something along the lines of GeekSquad inside BestBuy.
Fiveplus 6y ago
I never realized that. As a matter of fact, is there one in CLT?
- Dork_Sider 6y ago
  It's in Southpark
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
muststopmyths 6y ago
Same with the SF Westfield Center store. Great staff. It was a good place to check out various Surfaces in person as well. I will say, the surfaces/laptops side of the store was usually empty. Some kids playing with the Xbox or people at the counter getting help seemed to be the extent of traffic the past couple of years. They seem to be aggressively destroying any paltry remaining goodwill with consumer enthusiasts. I'm sure it's great for the bottom line, but is the ultimate goal to only be competing with Google and AWS on who can run the cheapest Linux VMs in the cloud ?
- simonh 6y ago
  I don't really see the connection. If the only traffic to the stores was a handful of people, how can this have any significant effect on customer good will? They can't be both empty and influential. It seems like the stores were a missed opportunity, but they always had the odds stacked against them. Whatever you can get in an MS store, you could get a much cheaper alternative running the same software at another electronic goods store or online. I suspect the theoretical opportunity was really a mirage and never really there.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    While I agree with your premise, I think that the availability of a store is a form of goodwill. You are given more confidence in a product if you know there's a place where you can go when things go wrong, or if you want to see something for real, and not just rely on some rendered image on a screen. There's an Apple Store a few blocks from me. I've never been there. But I like knowing I have the option.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > There's an Apple Store a few blocks from me. I've never been there. But I like knowing I have the option. Right - I feel like almost any city I'm going to for a conference will have an Apple store I can pop into if I have a problem. What do you do if you have a ThinkPad or System76 and you get a problem while at a conference? I guess you're out of luck and on your own.
Cyph0n 6y ago
A fellow Raleigh-Durham-ite! The Microsoft store in Southpoint is/was indeed pretty great... But, the Apple store nearby always has much more traffic.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  I don't spend a lot of time in malls, but I've passed Microsoft Stores maybe six or seven times. My observation has been that they're always located as close to the Apple Store as possible, and that they are virtually empty, compared to the Apple Store. I remember one day it was particularly stark. There was a line to get in at the Apple Store (not a launch day), and there were only employees inside the Microsoft Store. It was then I realized that the Microsoft Store wasn't about selling things, it was just a branding exercise.
georgeecollins 6y ago
Agree! I used to walk through the store in Century City at lunch to see what was new in laptops, headsets, etc. They often had classes or lots of kids doing something on the computer. I made a few purchases there including a Surface tablet for my son that has been a great piece of hardware. Maybe this is the opening for someone else to come up with an experiential computer store. I hope so.
vorpalhex 6y ago
Same as my experience. While it was admittedly usually dead inside my local store, the clerks were happy to hang out and talk shop, super generous with freebies like t-shirts and the actual buying process was very smooth. As much as I complain about Microsoft, they did a very good job with their stores.
ptero 6y ago
Agree on "this is a real shame" feeling. I am not, in general, a heavy Microsoft user: my workstations both at home and in the office run Linux. But a few years ago, when I saw a Microsoft Surface tablet when I walked by the Microsoft store as I was waiting for my wife at the mall I was wowed by its ergonomics. Within three months I bought one as a personal travel laptop and another one for work as my main laptop. An extended family member saw my Surface and bought one. Two people at work saw my work Surface and bought theirs for work. Having a Windows-only travel laptop made me look at WSL and I saw that while it was not perfect it is surprisingly useful which also surprised some die-hard Linux folks at work when they saw it. None of this would have happened if I did not walk by that Microsoft store; I would be buying another Dell laptop for work and griping about its lousy ergonomics.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  I was also a fan of the early Surface Pros, although I didn't like the larger form factor of the later models. The early models were small enough to fit in a big coat pocket.
- dustinmoris 6y ago
  Interestingly for me it was almost the opposite experience. I got really excited about the Surface Book and was really close to buy one, then a couple days later I walked past the Microsoft Store on Oxford Street and saw one in real life and was extremely shocked/disappointed how huge, heavy and really really thick it is. It made me realise how unportable this portable device is and I never thought again of buying a Surface book. I think the latest Surface Book still has that monster big ass fist thick hinge and I'm not surprised that I haven't seen a single person with a Surface Book in a coffee shop yet. It's too big for being a portable device. So in some respect, the physical store has meant that they sold one device less in my case.
  - eddhead 6y ago
    I have the book and it's fantastic, it's really NOT an unltrabook and is meant to be a workstation. The Book 3 even comes with a Quadro GPU
philshem 6y ago
> I made several warranty claims in-store, and they went above and beyond to help me out, even when my grounds for a claim were kinda shaky. Maybe having a physical store that lowers the barrier for making warranty claims, especially “shaky” ones, isn’t a profit maker. ;)
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Maybe having a physical store that lowers the barrier for making warranty claims, especially “shaky” ones, isn’t a profit maker. Cost to fix a shaky piece of kit: $100 Future sale made because someone is happy with your service: $1,000 While I like to blame this sort of myopic thinking on SV, it seems like an entire generation, or two, has forgotten that if you make someone happy today, you've made a customer for life. This was car sales 101 in the 1950's and 60's.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ta17711771 6y ago
    > Cost to fix a shaky piece of kit: $100 if they spend an hour or two fixing a screen your kid smashed for free, the screen costs $30-$50 wholesale, 1-2 hrs of labor, and fixed costs for the day like power, insurance, lease payment, etc...
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      And if they just have to click some setting, the parts cost is $0, and the labor is already factored into the person already being there.
  - smabie 6y ago
    Really? SV takes this to the extreme. The never make money, give out tons of coupons, charge super low prices, kind of strategy. If anything, SV is too far-sighted, not myopic.
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
that’s the first I’ve heard of that area called “the triangle.” mind sharing what it’s significant for and what kind of person would fit? I’ve considered moving to the SE for better weather and job opportunities as a new grad.
- opmac 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  I've gotten more in depth into this in the path, but I don't recommend people move to "the triangle" (I honestly don't know why that name has stuck, sure historically they may be linked, but unless you want to deal with ungodly traffic every day, you're probably not going to be going between Raleigh and Durham) Durham has some serious unresolved problems with crime, Raleigh and Durham both have problems with traffic, the tech scene is not that robust, house prices are on a rocketship shaped trajectory and frankly it feels like a bubble. I think the core of my complaints has generally been, if you want suburban sprawl, you can go literally anywhere on the eastern seaboard. There are safer cities than Durham, there are cities like Raleigh that don't have the same problems with growth it's facing If you want a "city feeling", RDU isn't it. Raleigh downtown is how many blocks? Not many. Public transport is terrible so you're going to need a car if you can't contain your life in it. Maybe if you have a family to settle down and strong earning power and good savings it's a good idea (that is to say, maybe I don't know, I still wouldn't). Or you're on the opposite end of the spectrum and have a lower income and really young with more interest in living in a "happening" place. But for a new grad in tech or something in demand, your earning power is squandered on suppressed salaries (and no, it's not that mindboggling cheap to live there, especially not with all the money flowing in from all around the country), you're a little bit older than the point where most people are more interested in how many breweries per square mile there are. It just wasn't an appealing proposition to me. I moved back to NYC and now I make 1.5x what I did there, but my living expenses have not risen nearly 1.5x, and I've probably saved up in 6 months more than I did in 1 year there... at that point you can afford a few nice vacations a year to make up for the weather
fatnoah 6y ago
>Microsoft did a really good job of hiring diverse talent, and every store-clerk I ever interacted with was smart, nice, and seemed to genuinely care about fixing your issue This was my experience as well. As a bonus, my kiddo always wanted to stop into the Microsoft store. There was something warm and inviting about it, especially in comparison to the Apple store (we lived about 1/2 a block from each).
omaranto 6y ago
I have funny story of being helped in a Microsoft store. I once bought a BLU Windows Phone in a Microsoft store. I really liked having a Windows Phone mostly because no one I ever met had seen one before and both Apple and Android users were shocked when they saw it. :) After a few years my phone's battery indicator started failing, or at least that's what I think the problem was. The phone would suddenly say it was almost out of battery and had to shut down. When I restarted it the battery indicator would say some more reasonable number, consistent with how long ago I had charged the phone; but after a little while, long before it should have been running out of battery, it would again say it had almost no battery left and turn itself off. I thought the phone's problem wasn't too serious yet and with some vigilance (checking it frequently to turn it on as soon as it turned itself off) I could use it a little longer. But my wife thought it was time for me to get a new phone, so I went to a Microsoft store only to discover they didn't sell them anymore. I think by then everyone had decided to give up on Windows Phones; I still valued what was their main selling point for me, the shock value, and would have gladly bought another! At the store I started chatting a bit about my phone with the clerk who told me they didn't sell Windows Phones anymore, a heavyset young man. At some point I wanted to show him something on the phone so I took it out of my pocket but fumbled and dropped the phone. When the clerk saw I was about to drop the phone near him, he lifted the leg nearest the phone, but lost his balance and brought his foot down hard, right on my phone! After that the phone wouldn't turn on anymore. The clerk was very apologetic and seemed willing to pay at least partially to replace my phone but I insisted that I was about to replace it anyway. I went somewhere else and bought myself a cheap Android phone. My wife was very happy the clerk had stepped on my Windows Phone since I had the left the house unconvinced it needed immediate replacement.
- Animats 6y ago
  but lost his balance and brought his foot down hard, right on my phone! That shouldn't be a problem.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/mVPku-xItv8 https://youtu.be/mVPku-xItv8
- kumarharsh 6y ago
  That's sad but hilarious! I think that young man was Microsoft personified! (I'm not a hater - owned 2 Windows Phones myself, but MS's strategy always seemed self-defeating in the Phone space)
AzzieElbab 6y ago
Ms stores were a really sad sight at the malls when not positioned far enough from Apple stores. Maybe they should try Xbox store or something else that does not remind ppl of work

xphilter 6y ago

I agree, but I kinda feel like the relaxed and comfortable atmosphere was more of an indication that the stores weren’t doing so hot. Every time I went to one is was because it was quieter and lower key than other stores. And I never actually wanted to buy things. Maybe that’s good(ish) marketing but probably doesn’t make good business sense.

HarryHirsch 6y ago
Being able to inspect hardware before buying is a good idea, even if you do put the order in online.
sterwill 6y ago
That may be the case. I rarely go inside my local mall (Southpoint, Durham NC), but on sunny weekends the Apple store was often jam-packed with people. So busy that customers had a hard time getting through the door. Sales people talking non-stop and processing orders as fast as possible. There was a Microsoft store inside the main mall building, just a few minutes away. I walked by it a few times, but it was usually empty.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  South point Apple has always been painful - I avoided it like the plague. I think it’s the only store in the area besides Charlotte.
  - vtbassmatt 6y ago
    Crabtree has one too. It's just as crowded and awful.
- nonrecursive 6y ago
  Good god the Southpoint Apple store is terrible. I went there once because I wanted to buy a new iPad and apple pencil so I could participate in a digital painting workshop the next day, and they wanted me to wait 45 minutes before they would help me. I said that I wasn't going to wait that long and hopefully wasn't an asshole about it (it's never cool to be a jerk to retail employees!) and they did manage to ring me up within about 5 minutes. The experience was just so weirdly baffling and frustrating and I've since avoided the place. I realize this sounds like the height of American consumer entitlement but it was truly bizarre that the response to "Hi I would like to hand you more than $1,200" was "please wait 45 minutes." Then there was also the confusion about who to actually to talk to in the first place if you wanted to buy something. Do I talk to the person at the door? Nope, because I don't have an appointment. I should just stand in a corner and hope someone finally talks to me. It was truly amazing that Apple could so thoroughly botch the experience of exchanging money for goods.
  - jedieaston 6y ago
    I had a similar experience a couple years ago with a $2k MacBook Pro, except they did the whole spiel. “No, please! I want to give you money. Can I please give you money now?”
  - tracker1 6y ago
    I've had a couple decent experiences in the Apple store in Chandler, AZ mall. First was a battery replacement in-warranty, second was a pickup, then a return/exchange. The battery replacement did take longer than I would have preferred about half an hour, but not bad in general. A few years later, I got a mid-2014 rmbp, and didn't know they'd soldered on the RAM and that the storage wasn't upgradeable... wound up forking over for a top end model. Of course with each progressive release being a little more cumbersome, and never really liking iOS devices. Some of the security locks that you can't turn off (enabled 2fa then sold off one of my two devices, don't know how the 2fa code got delivered to the device I was trying to re-log into, but was lucky in the end). I gifted my last mbp this past xmas, and haven't looked back. I am mostly on my desktop or work issued laptop now. Hoping to see an upper-mid to high-end Ryzen model with at least 64gb ram and at least an RTX 2070 level gpu. All the current gen Ryzen laptops are seriously gimped in one way or another.
pkulak 6y ago
That's a good point. I hate going to the Apple store because you pretty much have to get in line behind a dozen other people for the privilege of buying a $1000 phone or $2500 laptop. The Microsoft store down the block was always super chill by comparison...
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
I mean, these were obviously set up as a (marketing) counterpoint to the Apple stores, but Apple stores aren't just marketing. In any given mall, Apple stores usually have the highest revenue per square foot - they even beat out the jewelry stores. Microsoft was never going to be able to sell enough surface tables and xboxes for this to be viable long-term.
- bobsil1 6y ago
  Agree. MS is mainly an OEM and enterprise co focused on TCO, etc. over consumer polish.

mc32 6y ago

I wish announcements were more straightforward. I’m looking at their announcement but can’t figure out what they mean by: “...We will continue to co-locate engineering, sales, support, envisioning centers, executive briefing centers, and retail spaces for maximum impact for our customers and our company.” What does that actually mean in real terms?

parsimo2010 6y ago
They will keep a support team (not just salespeople) near big customers where it would be better to employ people locally compared to having to send support staff from Redmond each time a customer has a problem.
dylan604 6y ago
Probably something along the lines of GeekSquad inside BestBuy.

Fiveplus 6y ago

I never realized that. As a matter of fact, is there one in CLT?

Dork_Sider 6y ago
It's in Southpark
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

muststopmyths 6y ago

Same with the SF Westfield Center store. Great staff. It was a good place to check out various Surfaces in person as well. I will say, the surfaces/laptops side of the store was usually empty. Some kids playing with the Xbox or people at the counter getting help seemed to be the extent of traffic the past couple of years. They seem to be aggressively destroying any paltry remaining goodwill with consumer enthusiasts. I'm sure it's great for the bottom line, but is the ultimate goal to only be competing with Google and AWS on who can run the cheapest Linux VMs in the cloud ?

simonh 6y ago
I don't really see the connection. If the only traffic to the stores was a handful of people, how can this have any significant effect on customer good will? They can't be both empty and influential. It seems like the stores were a missed opportunity, but they always had the odds stacked against them. Whatever you can get in an MS store, you could get a much cheaper alternative running the same software at another electronic goods store or online. I suspect the theoretical opportunity was really a mirage and never really there.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  While I agree with your premise, I think that the availability of a store is a form of goodwill. You are given more confidence in a product if you know there's a place where you can go when things go wrong, or if you want to see something for real, and not just rely on some rendered image on a screen. There's an Apple Store a few blocks from me. I've never been there. But I like knowing I have the option.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > There's an Apple Store a few blocks from me. I've never been there. But I like knowing I have the option. Right - I feel like almost any city I'm going to for a conference will have an Apple store I can pop into if I have a problem. What do you do if you have a ThinkPad or System76 and you get a problem while at a conference? I guess you're out of luck and on your own.

Cyph0n 6y ago

A fellow Raleigh-Durham-ite! The Microsoft store in Southpoint is/was indeed pretty great... But, the Apple store nearby always has much more traffic.

reaperducer 6y ago
I don't spend a lot of time in malls, but I've passed Microsoft Stores maybe six or seven times. My observation has been that they're always located as close to the Apple Store as possible, and that they are virtually empty, compared to the Apple Store. I remember one day it was particularly stark. There was a line to get in at the Apple Store (not a launch day), and there were only employees inside the Microsoft Store. It was then I realized that the Microsoft Store wasn't about selling things, it was just a branding exercise.

georgeecollins 6y ago

Agree! I used to walk through the store in Century City at lunch to see what was new in laptops, headsets, etc. They often had classes or lots of kids doing something on the computer. I made a few purchases there including a Surface tablet for my son that has been a great piece of hardware. Maybe this is the opening for someone else to come up with an experiential computer store. I hope so.

vorpalhex 6y ago

Same as my experience. While it was admittedly usually dead inside my local store, the clerks were happy to hang out and talk shop, super generous with freebies like t-shirts and the actual buying process was very smooth. As much as I complain about Microsoft, they did a very good job with their stores.

ptero 6y ago

Agree on "this is a real shame" feeling. I am not, in general, a heavy Microsoft user: my workstations both at home and in the office run Linux. But a few years ago, when I saw a Microsoft Surface tablet when I walked by the Microsoft store as I was waiting for my wife at the mall I was wowed by its ergonomics. Within three months I bought one as a personal travel laptop and another one for work as my main laptop. An extended family member saw my Surface and bought one. Two people at work saw my work Surface and bought theirs for work. Having a Windows-only travel laptop made me look at WSL and I saw that while it was not perfect it is surprisingly useful which also surprised some die-hard Linux folks at work when they saw it. None of this would have happened if I did not walk by that Microsoft store; I would be buying another Dell laptop for work and griping about its lousy ergonomics.

saalweachter 6y ago
I was also a fan of the early Surface Pros, although I didn't like the larger form factor of the later models. The early models were small enough to fit in a big coat pocket.
dustinmoris 6y ago
Interestingly for me it was almost the opposite experience. I got really excited about the Surface Book and was really close to buy one, then a couple days later I walked past the Microsoft Store on Oxford Street and saw one in real life and was extremely shocked/disappointed how huge, heavy and really really thick it is. It made me realise how unportable this portable device is and I never thought again of buying a Surface book. I think the latest Surface Book still has that monster big ass fist thick hinge and I'm not surprised that I haven't seen a single person with a Surface Book in a coffee shop yet. It's too big for being a portable device. So in some respect, the physical store has meant that they sold one device less in my case.
- eddhead 6y ago
  I have the book and it's fantastic, it's really NOT an unltrabook and is meant to be a workstation. The Book 3 even comes with a Quadro GPU

philshem 6y ago

> I made several warranty claims in-store, and they went above and beyond to help me out, even when my grounds for a claim were kinda shaky. Maybe having a physical store that lowers the barrier for making warranty claims, especially “shaky” ones, isn’t a profit maker. ;)

reaperducer 6y ago
Maybe having a physical store that lowers the barrier for making warranty claims, especially “shaky” ones, isn’t a profit maker. Cost to fix a shaky piece of kit: $100 Future sale made because someone is happy with your service: $1,000 While I like to blame this sort of myopic thinking on SV, it seems like an entire generation, or two, has forgotten that if you make someone happy today, you've made a customer for life. This was car sales 101 in the 1950's and 60's.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ta17711771 6y ago
  > Cost to fix a shaky piece of kit: $100 if they spend an hour or two fixing a screen your kid smashed for free, the screen costs $30-$50 wholesale, 1-2 hrs of labor, and fixed costs for the day like power, insurance, lease payment, etc...
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    And if they just have to click some setting, the parts cost is $0, and the labor is already factored into the person already being there.
- smabie 6y ago
  Really? SV takes this to the extreme. The never make money, give out tons of coupons, charge super low prices, kind of strategy. If anything, SV is too far-sighted, not myopic.

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago

that’s the first I’ve heard of that area called “the triangle.” mind sharing what it’s significant for and what kind of person would fit? I’ve considered moving to the SE for better weather and job opportunities as a new grad.

opmac 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle
BoorishBears 6y ago
I've gotten more in depth into this in the path, but I don't recommend people move to "the triangle" (I honestly don't know why that name has stuck, sure historically they may be linked, but unless you want to deal with ungodly traffic every day, you're probably not going to be going between Raleigh and Durham) Durham has some serious unresolved problems with crime, Raleigh and Durham both have problems with traffic, the tech scene is not that robust, house prices are on a rocketship shaped trajectory and frankly it feels like a bubble. I think the core of my complaints has generally been, if you want suburban sprawl, you can go literally anywhere on the eastern seaboard. There are safer cities than Durham, there are cities like Raleigh that don't have the same problems with growth it's facing If you want a "city feeling", RDU isn't it. Raleigh downtown is how many blocks? Not many. Public transport is terrible so you're going to need a car if you can't contain your life in it. Maybe if you have a family to settle down and strong earning power and good savings it's a good idea (that is to say, maybe I don't know, I still wouldn't). Or you're on the opposite end of the spectrum and have a lower income and really young with more interest in living in a "happening" place. But for a new grad in tech or something in demand, your earning power is squandered on suppressed salaries (and no, it's not that mindboggling cheap to live there, especially not with all the money flowing in from all around the country), you're a little bit older than the point where most people are more interested in how many breweries per square mile there are. It just wasn't an appealing proposition to me. I moved back to NYC and now I make 1.5x what I did there, but my living expenses have not risen nearly 1.5x, and I've probably saved up in 6 months more than I did in 1 year there... at that point you can afford a few nice vacations a year to make up for the weather

fatnoah 6y ago

>Microsoft did a really good job of hiring diverse talent, and every store-clerk I ever interacted with was smart, nice, and seemed to genuinely care about fixing your issue This was my experience as well. As a bonus, my kiddo always wanted to stop into the Microsoft store. There was something warm and inviting about it, especially in comparison to the Apple store (we lived about 1/2 a block from each).

omaranto 6y ago

I have funny story of being helped in a Microsoft store. I once bought a BLU Windows Phone in a Microsoft store. I really liked having a Windows Phone mostly because no one I ever met had seen one before and both Apple and Android users were shocked when they saw it. :) After a few years my phone's battery indicator started failing, or at least that's what I think the problem was. The phone would suddenly say it was almost out of battery and had to shut down. When I restarted it the battery indicator would say some more reasonable number, consistent with how long ago I had charged the phone; but after a little while, long before it should have been running out of battery, it would again say it had almost no battery left and turn itself off. I thought the phone's problem wasn't too serious yet and with some vigilance (checking it frequently to turn it on as soon as it turned itself off) I could use it a little longer. But my wife thought it was time for me to get a new phone, so I went to a Microsoft store only to discover they didn't sell them anymore. I think by then everyone had decided to give up on Windows Phones; I still valued what was their main selling point for me, the shock value, and would have gladly bought another! At the store I started chatting a bit about my phone with the clerk who told me they didn't sell Windows Phones anymore, a heavyset young man. At some point I wanted to show him something on the phone so I took it out of my pocket but fumbled and dropped the phone. When the clerk saw I was about to drop the phone near him, he lifted the leg nearest the phone, but lost his balance and brought his foot down hard, right on my phone! After that the phone wouldn't turn on anymore. The clerk was very apologetic and seemed willing to pay at least partially to replace my phone but I insisted that I was about to replace it anyway. I went somewhere else and bought myself a cheap Android phone. My wife was very happy the clerk had stepped on my Windows Phone since I had the left the house unconvinced it needed immediate replacement.

Animats 6y ago
but lost his balance and brought his foot down hard, right on my phone! That shouldn't be a problem.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/mVPku-xItv8 https://youtu.be/mVPku-xItv8
kumarharsh 6y ago
That's sad but hilarious! I think that young man was Microsoft personified! (I'm not a hater - owned 2 Windows Phones myself, but MS's strategy always seemed self-defeating in the Phone space)

AzzieElbab 6y ago

Ms stores were a really sad sight at the malls when not positioned far enough from Apple stores. Maybe they should try Xbox store or something else that does not remind ppl of work