By Joe Wilcox, Betanews
Yesterday, Black Friday 2009, I drove 70 miles north from San Diego to Mission Viejo, Calif. My goal: To answer that question. In October, Microsoft opened two retail outlets, in Arizona and California, that do remind of Apple Store.
Tech bloggers, particularly those in the Mac camp, have repeatedly slammed Microsoft for imitating Apple and doing so badly. But as the saying goes, imitation is the best form of flattery — and imitation is quite common in retail.
Read More...
It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft’s Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone. It’s all the more impressive when you realize that Flash video still has not made its way (permanently) to the iPhone, not for any technical reasons we know of…simply because Apple wants to control the video channel for streaming media to its devices. 