The intense metamorphosis suffered by the Microsoft in a matter of years. From a monolithic and evil megacorporation to a jovial company, willing to bet a lot of money on innovations that often do not go forward, but serve the noble purpose of bringing new perspectives to the world of technology, I cannot say if this was an effective restructuring process or simply an extremely successful marketing trick.
The fact that everyone today supports Microsoft. Well, almost everyone: if we take into account the popularity of the official stores of the Redmond giant, perhaps that number of supporters is not that high.
In a matter published in the Recode today, the frequency and relevance problems faced by Microsoft Stores fruits of a megalomaniac project to face the infamous Apple Retail Stores (and copying inspired by several ideas of the latter in the process, I cannot fail to notice). According to the report, the more than 100 stores across the United States and Canada suffer from a lack of public, being always empty and often outnumbered by even the tiny kiosks of Amazon.
Although Microsoft does not disclose store-related revenue or traffic numbers, it is also very common that the number of employees exceeds that of customers within the premises, which is always a bad sign.
The company itself ignores the situation. According to Microsoft, the stores are intended to be more than simple points of sale, representing instead a physical manifestation of the company's renewed spirit. The problem, of course, is not having customers to take advantage of this spirit and the myriad of Surfaces, Xboxes, Lumias, Kinects, HoloLens and beautiful company. Microsoft retail general manager Kelly Soligon notes, without apparent conviction:
Are we satisfied with our traffic? Yes. Do we always want more? Yes.
On the other hand, the malevolent corporation cloak today worn much more often by Google and, like it or not, by Apple itself from time to time finds its way back to its former owner. In a clear example of these messages, Microsoft set the date for the death of the Sunrise, beautiful calendar app acquired by her last year: August 31st.
() We will no longer offer support and updates for Sunrise. There will be no new features, or bug fixes. For us, this is the definition of a bad app and not a user experience that we want to leave with you. Therefore, we will remove Sunrise from the app stores in the next few days. On August 31, the app will be shut down and cease to function completely.
The justification given by Microsoft is that the Sunrise team will dedicate itself to (admittedly excellent) Outlook applications for mobile devices, which, in time, will inherit the best resources of the dying, soon to be deceased service.
As sad as it is to witness the death of yet another beloved and promising service by the hands of a large corporation (as Google, Apple and even Dropbox have already done), it remains rooted for the legacy of Sunrise to survive in Outlook as best as possible.
(via Cult of Mac, TechCrunch)
