Microsoft Stores Come Near to Apple Stores

At the Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles, the Apple and Microsoft stores are close enough that when you leave one you’ll almost immediately see the other.

That’s helpful for consumers interested in exploring both rival camps. The Apple Store is a known quantity. The Microsoft Store isn’t, for many people. That’s too bad, because a Microsoft store offers a much better snapshot of cutting-edge Windows computers and devices than, like Best Buy.

For example, the Century City Microsoft Store devotes most of its display-table space to the latest ultra books, including the HP Folio 13, the glass-encased HP Envy 14 Spectre, and Asus Zenbooks, among others.

The store also has a whole table dedicated to tablets (or “slates” as Microsoft insists on calling them). And the sales people, when they saw me eying the slates, quickly produced an Intel-based Samsung tablet running the latest iteration of the Windows 8 consumer preview, as Cnet stated.

This kind of savvy sales approach is important, because you would rarely if ever see this behavior at Best Buy, and also because Windows 8 consumer preview running on the Samsung tablet was buttery smooth.