Microsoft pulls the plug on brick & mortar

There's always been a suspicion that Microsoft opened its 82 U.S. retail stores in part in reaction to the wild success of Apple stores, but it was always going to be tougher to make software look cool than gleaming white new tech. We'll probably never know if the operating system giant would have done so anyway, but the company has announced it will not be reopening its brick & mortar outlets, though its stores in London, Sydney and Redmond will be transformed into "experience centers." Microsoft's retail team worked off-site to help small businesses and education customers make the leap to digital, doing virtual training for hundreds of thousands of customers and helping customers with support calls. “We deliberately built teams with unique backgrounds and skills that could serve customers from anywhere," wrote David Porter, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President Microsoft in a statement. "The evolution of our workforce ensured we could continue to serve customers of all sizes when they needed us most, working remotely these last months."