Microsoft Reportedly Poaching Apple Retail Staff 375
Eugen notes an article up at Ars reporting that Microsoft, besides copying Apple's retail formula, is now going after Apple's retail employees. "Microsoft is reportedly trying to hire away Apple's retail employees by bribing them with... wait for it, better wages. 'People that have spoken to The Loop on condition of anonymity confirm that Microsoft has contacted a number of Apple's retail store managers to work in their stores. In addition to "significant raises," the managers have also been offered moving expenses in some cases.' It doesn't end there: once the ex-Apple managers have jumped ship, they are asked to contact their top sales employees at their old workplaces and offer them similar positions at Microsoft's retail stores, also with higher pay. ... If you work in an Apple store near a soon-to-be-opened Microsoft store, apparently the software giant is giving you a free pass; no looking through job postings necessary!"
Moving expenses are already standard (Score:5, Informative)
A) A paid for move, arranged for you, including having all your stuff packed and unpacked, and a hotel to stay in for a month while house hunting
or
B) A lump sum cash payout to do it yourself (mostly attractive to fresh out of college types with little to move)
I suspect they already had a similar program for retail. It's not a new benefit.
Re:Moving expenses are already standard (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gateway Stores (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe, but this sort of thing once killed Borland as a company (Microsoft poaching Borland employees), so this has worked in the past for MS.
WOW (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ethical Business Tactics (Score:5, Informative)
It'd be a bit weird. See, the "PC guy", John Hodgman, has actually been a Mac user since 1984 - except for a brief period, which he summarized as:
Re:Gateway Stores (Score:3, Informative)
No, poaching Ashton-Tate (to get dBase) was the biggest factor in Borland's demise. Overestimating the power of C++ was another (i.e. delaying Windows versions of their products to write them in C++).
Re:That's the market. (Score:3, Informative)
Um,
I don't know about you, but working for a company with that much cash laying around can't be ALL bad. If Microsoft is determined to do retail right (and I honestly have no idea if they're in it for the long haul...), they'll spend whatever money it takes to get it done.
See Xbox for a prior example of something Microsoft "couldn't possibly do as well as the other guys" that turned out to be lucrative for the employees involved. They've got the cash, so if you can get in on that gravy train, I say, more power to you.
Re:That's the market. (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, that's a long wait. The first time I read that I saw "half an hour". I've almost never seen lines that long and don't they let you make an appointment and at least go shopping elswhere if the lines are that long? How about this, I'll tell my genius bar story, I think it's basically the same story only I look at it the other way.
I bought a new MacBook online. When it arrived it didn't work, wouldn't even turn on. I called Apple's tech support and they had me bring it to the nearest Apple store, also they made an appointment for me. I went to the apple store, waited a few minutes for my 'Genius' who took one look at it and told me he had to swap out the RAM, which he did. Then I took my now working computer home.
Would I rather that my computer had worked in the first place? Yes. Have I spent hours on the phone with tech support from every other imaginable company where they did absolutely nothing to help without first having me do things like "unplug it and plug it back in"? Yes.
Y'know what, I have another story. A coworker of mine bought a laptop from Sony. When it showed up it the camera didn't work. Not the most important part in the world but it's nice to have your new thousand-dollar toy work out of the box. So she called Sony. I have no idea how long this took. In the end their solution was for her to ship the computer back to them so they could fix it. Remember how I live near an apple store? I also work near a SonyStyle store. Instead of doing the fix there, or replacing the computer as I suspect Apple would have done, they had her wait several weeks for the item she had just purchased. Could she have pushed them to replace the computer at their store? Probably, but it wasn't their first response.
What I'm not trying to say is that Apple is perfect, but they have a better commitment to helping solve customer problems then lots of other companies I've dealt with.
I'm not sure what you expect to buy with such better support then. I'd rather wait 30 minutes to see a pretentious tech who can fix my problem than an hour for a phone support tech who spends three hours trying instruction manual fixes and can't.
Re:Look at Sony stores (Score:4, Informative)
and they can afford to staff it well with AVERAGE annual sales per sq ft of ~$4000
for comparison: Best Buy = $971, Target = $300
Average Mall Store sales (for other stores) are around $400 per sq ft.
ref from 2006: [ifoapplestore.com] "so Johnson then offered some comparison between Apple and electronics retailer Best Buy. An Apple store does 67% of the revenue of a typical Best Buy store, he said, in just 10 percent of the square-footage."