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The other day I had a chance to go out to the malls and a couple of stores in smaller shopping centers. It’s a blood bath out there! It’s funny how you hear statistics that this Holiday season wasn’t so bad with only a slight downward drop from last year. The press just doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
Let’s take some examples. Have you ever heard of an after-Christmas sale at Nordstrom? Well, it’s not an official sale, mind you, but lots of stuff has red tags on it with deep discounts (I bought a new jacket for 40% off and I waited two months to buy it hoping prices would drop). There’s even a new couple of tables with 50% off ties. ‘Never seen that before.
Let’s compare Whole Foods to Shoppers. The high-end grocers have cut their prices, in many cases quite dramatically. Just take a mosey on down to Shoppers and what will you see? Yes, the prices are low, but take a look at the people walking around and buying. What bags are they carrying their purchases in? Recycled plastic bottle bags that say Trader Joe or Whole Foods on them. It’s hilarious to see consumers switch to the lowest priced store and yet walk around with high end grocer bags.
Now on to the malls. I’m seeing something I never saw before. There are some wings or locations within a mall where inline bay tenants pay top dollar. Near a food court is one and I’m seeing some temporary tenants in those spaces! They were always the prime spaces for the major national inline bay tenants, but no more. It makes me wonder how much the current retailers have gotten the landlords to lower their rent just to keep them.
Another trend I’m seeing is with kiosks. You know, those little cart-like or small space located in the hallways in single, disconnected row. I’m seeing more vacancy there than ever with more turnover to. A few of the staples such as Orange Julius are also missing.
As for the signs, 50 to 70 percent is the norm. I walked into a well established shoe store and had to leave because they were “only” offering 25 percent off the second pair if I bought the first for full price. I don’t think so. I’d rather go to Macy’s with their 40 percent off just about everything. J.C. Penney’s has 75 percent off everything too and there are some good things for almost nothing that I couldn’t pass up.
Another indication that it’s “dead” is the utter lack of “coming soon” boarded up storefronts in the malls. There’s just no demand for expanding. The recession has been going on so long that realities has fully kicked in. After two poor Holiday seasons, there’s no optimism left in the retailers. As long as the unemployment rate continues to stay around 10 percent, it’s just not going to change. The retailers are in full survival mode and it’s not going to change.
I’d like to wrap up this series with the funny ironies I see between the Microsoft and Apple camps.
- It’s ironic that big business doesn’t switch yet spends gobs of money on IT solving viruses and other problems that go away with Apple.
- It’s ironic that Apple doesn’t make a more feature-competitive business suite to challenge Microsoft Office.
- It’s ironic that Apple has so very many cheap or no cost add-ons yet has no database or built-in programming functionality on the scale of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, the macro language of the Office Suite) or .Net.
- It’s ironic that users of Microsoft windows use or would prefer using the Apple OS over Microsoft Windows yet they’re not given a choice by the corporate world.
- It’s ironic that so very many employees use Windows at work yet use Apple at home.
- It’s ironic that when the time comes when big business will finally decide to move to Windows 7 or some other future version of Windows that they won’t do a full cost benefit analysis and compare that to Apple. I’d bet that Apple would be less expensive when this magic time comes even though, ironically, their computer are more expensive.
As for me, I’ve made the switch to Apple as an OS but will keep using the Microsoft Office Suite for my work. I say that today, but don’t be surprised if I switch to iWorks in the future… if nothing else, to just leave the Microsoft-centric world entirely.
John Simpson, MAI
Why Companies Don’t Switch to Apple As Much As They Should
The answer to this question is really very simple. It’s called “switching costs”. It’s exactly why Microsoft Windows and Office can’t be unseated from their lofty thrones. The cost of switching from Apple to PC is not the cost of the hardware and software… it’s the perceived productivity loss and mental burden of the switch that stops most companies. For small businesses, it’s not too painful, but the sheer cost to medium and large firms both in terms of hardware, software, training and the inevitable “how do I do this” questions are just too great.
The transition for medium and large business will never occur. That’s right… I said never. I have a perfect example of why courtesy of Microsoft Windows. There are a ton of large companies and especially the U.S. Government that didn’t move to Vista. They won’t be moving to Windows 7 or any other future version either. Yes, it costs a big amount of money to buy the hardware and software, but that’s not why they won’t switch; it’s only half the battle. The other half is that “switching cost”, which in this case is the cost to train their employees, retrain their entire security division, retrain their IT personnel to handle the hardware and the time to retrain their IT people to answer user questions, which you know would come like a tidal wave when the switch was made. There’s also the big fear that things might go wrong… the ever present fear factor.
These medium and large business owners know one thing that many people don’t. It’s called GES, which stands for “Good Enough Software”. They know that users are only using their business computers in a superficial way. The operating system is just a shell and a way to move around between Microsoft Office programs. It’s not broken so it doesn’t need to be fixed.
The same applies to other programs. Why get SharePoint when you’ve got Excel spreadsheets to show the status of each project? Why get Microsoft Project when Excel does the job, albeit with a lot less “power” than that offered by other programs? Why use anything other than Excel or proprietary online databases when you need to share information between people, teams and entire divisions? Again, GES is how business works. There’s no such thing as a non-IT company made up of technological evangelists.
In the last part of this series, I’ll explore the ironies of the Microsoft versus Apple situations. It’s good for a few laughs!
John Simpson, MAI
When It’s Broke…
We’ve had some real-world experience in this. When our Apple laptop broke, it was no problem getting it completely replaced. We didn’t have to go through three or four iterations with tech support people who spend an hour on the phone asking us the same darn idiotic questions before finally, months later, replacing our defective unit.
When your Apple computer breaks, you bring it into the store where you get a positive experience. With a Dell or HP computer, there’s no store to bring it too (by that, I mean a Dell or HP store… Office Depot or Best Buys doesn’t count). In the Microsoft/Intel world, you spend forever on the phone with some idiot representative who plays 21 questions with you and you’re diving deep into your box trying things that he/she suggests. In the Microsoft/Intel world, my time is worth nothing… it’s free to them! Sorry… I don’t view it that way.
Maybe if I have the right warranty, I can get someone out to fix my computer, which I’ve had happen about a half-dozen times with different computer makers. In every case that I experienced, they came out, diagnosed my computer but didn’t have the parts with them. They had to order them. Meanwhile my box was a brick just sitting there until the parts arrived and the tech person could make the time to come back. Not so in the Apple camp where I drop it off and don’t have to deal with this headache. Even if it takes just as long, it’s fewer steps for me.
Let me put this another way. When your car needs major fixing, you drop it off and go somewhere else. You’re not asked to get under the hood, get dirty and try to diagnose the thing with the mechanic looking over your shoulder. You don’t have to go through the warranty shuffle to find out if that part and/or labor is covered and how much you’ll pay out of pocket.
Now that’s something I really appreciate. No wonder Apple’s sales are so good.
Customer Service?
We all know customer service is dead in America. No, let me amend that to add “outside of the Apple stores.” Take a look at the ratio of Apple store personnel to square feet leased. You won’t get that at the Sony store in the same mall or other retailers. Yes, there are lots of people in there, but that’s a chicken-or-the-egg question. The point here is that I’d rather have a store full of people mostly looking for themselves and select a representative rather than dealing with navigating a corporate telephone menu hoping to get the right person. Maybe it’s a humanistic thing with me, but I don’t think so. If you walk into an Apple store with a little thing, just bring your computer and they will fix it right there. You may wait a little while as they take it to the back and work at it on the bench, but so what? I don’t have to schlep the thing down to the UPS Store, pay for a box with popcorn in it, pay for the shipping, wait for it to be fixed and then hope it doesn’t get broken in shipping back to me or stolen from my front door when I’m away. My friend, there is no comparing solving your little problems almost instantaneously at Apple compared to the PC camp.
In the next part, I’ll explore why medium and large size businesses haven’t, and won’t, adopt the Apple.
John Simpson, MAI
The Add-on Market
Another area where there is no comparison is in add-ons. Yes, the Microsoft camp has tons of programs, far more than Apple. Yet Apple has add-ons that cost hardly anything or nothing. I guess you pay for power, yet how many people use it? Apple has it all over Microsoft in this camp. A small add-on that costs, say, $10, that you’ll use all the time is worth a lot more than a $100 program that tries to pin you into their interface and makes you learn how they want you to work.
Feature Set
Although I’ve been using Apple’s OS and business productivity suite for a while, I have to admit that Microsoft wins this comparison by a handy margin. Apple’s OS is indeed easier to use and less cumbersome. You don’t have eight ways to do something, you have one or maybe two. We only remember one or two ways to do anything anyway. I really like that.
Yet when it comes to the overall feature set, Microsoft gives you many more options. Outlook blows away Apple Mail. The Outlook task list is far more robust that that in Apple Mail. For the most common tasks with programs, Apple is easier to use, but you’ll have lots of those little moments where you’ll say “why the heck doesn’t it work like [you fill in the blank]?” Every day I use Outlook at work and Mail at home, so I always have these moments.
Flexibility
If you’re a power user, you’ll love Windows and yawn over Apple. Even “lightweight” Microsoft Access is light years ahead of the meager Apple database program offerings. You can just do lots of stuff in Microsoft programs that go beyond daily activities that you’re hard pressed or can’t do in Apple. Yet the funny thing is that most power users aren’t really doing that much with the power that’s available, so I guess this is a double-edge sword.
In Part 4, more comparisons for you.
John Simpson, MAI
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