Microsoft Plays Catch-up with Apple’s App Store, Retail Chain

Fed up of being cast as the geeky older brother of Mac, Microsoft is taking a few initiatives to step up their cool cred, announcing plans to launch its own mobile applications store called Windows Marketplace, in an attempt to replicate the success of Apple’s App Store.

Apple launched the App Store on iTunes last summer as a virtual store where developers can sell their software applications, with Apple keeping 30 per cent of the profits; hundreds of apps that turn your iPhone into a lightsabre later, it’s not done badly. Apple said last month that there are a total of 15,000 applications available and they have generated more than 500 million hits from users in six months. 

So Windows predictably wants some of the action. Although Windows Marketplace will not be ready for the public until later this year, the company is currently in talks with the mobile phone networks about how revenue made through the applications will be shared.

Microsoft is the last to catch up with Apple, after other manufacturers have been hurriedly getting their act together. In October, Google announced that it was creating a virtual app store for its Android phones and BlackBerry maker, Research In Motion, followed with a similar announcement.

Yesterday Nokia unveiled its Ovi Store, which works out your location and stores your “past consumer behavior” to offer a therefore rather sinister set of personally tailored apps and services. Microsoft is in major competition with these other companies, but Apple is less threatened, because they control their hardware, the operating system that runs on it and many of the applications. Microsoft does not make hardware and mostly sells applications that other companies use.

As competitive brothers tend to do, Mac and Microsoft are constantly trying to outdo one another, but instead of attempting to do something new, the older sibling is going to copy what the other has already done. As well as its acme App Store, Microsoft announced plans to launch its latest smartphone operating system, the Windows Mobile 6.5, which includes quick access to updates such as emails and calendar appointments in a very similar manner to the iPhone. Yesterday they took the copycatting further and decided to start a retail chain sector. The number of stores that will be opened and the product range is yet to be decided.

“The purpose of opening these stores is to create deeper engagement with consumers and continue to learn first-hand about what they want and how they buy,” Microsoft said. But analysts are very doubtful that the shop will have anything like the universal appeal of Apple’s stylish shops.

Microsoft has hired David Porter as the corporate vice president of future retail stores, who has 25 years experience at Walmart. If that’s a preview to the future stores of Microsoft we can presumably expect fluorescent lighting, massive aisles, and overweight middle-Americans, while the hipsters carry on drinking in the clean lines and bright colours at Apple…

Posted by Trista Orchard in Sci-tech | February 18, 2009 12:46PM |