Retailers share blame for poor Windows 8 sales

Retailers share part of the blame for poor Windows 8 sales and the ensuing decline of PC shipments, analysts contended today.

Microsoft’s radical overhaul of Windows has been cited by some to explain plummeting PC shipments, but the very organizations whose best interest is served in selling those systems were at least partly at fault.

“Windows 8 brought a brand new UI [user interface] that had not fundamentally changed since DOS,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in a blog post Tuesday. “[So] how did big-box retail respond? The same way they have for the last 20 years.”

Moorhead was critical of big retailers—Best Buy is the largest in the U.S.—for not modifying how they sold PCs when Windows 8 landed on their stores’ shipping docks.

“There exists a massive disconnect between what consumers want to and need to know about the latest generation of PCs” and what retailers did, and continue to do, to sell those PCs,” Moorhead argued, ticking off a list of retailing blunders, such as tying down devices so that they can’t be hefted for weight, PCs that can’t be turned off and on again to gauge boot speed, and a lack of touchscreen displays.

“The stores just do not provide, for many, the environment that meets the needs of someone trying to buy a new Windows 8 notebook,” said Moorhead.

Stephen Baker of the NPD Group, and an expert in technology retailing, agreed. “Nothing happened at launch,” Baker said of in-store changes when Windows 8 hit. “Everyone treated it as if was another Windows 7.”

And the same old-same old was definitely not what was necessary. “Does the in-store experience need an upgrade [because of Windows 8]?” Baker asked. “Absolutely. Are the in-store mechanisms up to snuff? Absolutely not.”

But Baker disputed the idea that retailers alone were to blame for how they sold Windows 8. The operating system was so different, he said, that retailers were either unprepared or unsure how to merchandise the goods.

And in some cases, they didn’t even have the goods—and largely still don’t—to sell.

:story: PCWorld