There's retailing and there's the Apple store
Apple didn't opt for San Francisco or New York when it picked the location of its largest retail outlet ever. No, London got the nod. The doors of the Apple Store at 235 Regent Street opened on 20 November and they've been open most of the time since then: 10:00 am to 9:00 pm from Monday to Saturday and 12 noon to 6:00 pm on Sundays are the trading hours. One can sell a lot of iPods and iBooks during a 72-hour week and Apple certainly does the business. What's the USP the staff stress when advising those torn between buying a PC or a Mac? Absence of viruses and a more stable OS. Unless you've got armour-plated virus protection today, your PC is going to get hit, and hard; Mac owners don't have that kind of worry, and compared to Windows, which was built in pieces, OSX is a much more stable operating system. Well, that's the pitch, anyway.
But it's not all about the hard sell at the Apple Store. The space fairly hums with creative activity. It's hosting 250 events this month alone. There are free workshops and presentations for beginners and pros. You can attend courses, hang out with the nerds in the Genius Bar and attend shows in the theatre. Which is what I did on Tuesday night. The performer was Martin Baker of Digital Heaven, a post production facility in West London. It provides facilities to both independent film producers and major broadcasters. Digital Heaven now uses Apple's Final Cut Pro editing software and has developed ten new plug-ins since making the switch. It's a niche, and a hot one.
At the core of the Apple retailing concept is the thinking that if you've got something sophisticated to sell, and if you turn the purchasing experience into something that respects the intelligence of the consumer, the business will flourish. Seems to be working so far.
NOTE: The issue discussed in yesterday's post, the spread of the Firefox browser, is expanded upon in today's New York Times by the Silicon Valley-based historian and author Randall Stross. In "The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)", Stross is scathing in his derision of Redmond's "stodgy" Internet Explorer. As someone who gave up on Netscape and urged users to switch to Explorer I should be wincing when I read this kind of article, but there was a time when it was the better browser. Honest. That day has passed, though. From security to size to features, as Stross points out, Firefox beats Explorer hands down. Time for us all to get with the program, then.
