I have been to MSFT stores in San Diego and Seattle. They were like that before Surface. I felt dirty, and a little sad for everyone in the store.

Visiting their store feels like you've stepped into a Halloween horror movie.

The staff must be forced to take lithium at the start of each shift. At the Microsoft store in Chicago, it's not only empty and in the least 'cool' part of the city (distant suburbs), but the constant demos felt like I was a victim in a Saw movie. I had to enthusiastically play a Kinect game... or else.

The Apple store do the forced cheering by sales staff. I find that really tacky.

Apple stores so crowded, its hard to get the attention of the sales guys. They are super busy, even on a monday morning. In santa clara, the microsoft store is right in front of apple store. Once I went to apple store on a monday morning, to fix my wife's phone. The apple store was packed at 10.30 AM, I had to wait 2 hours to get it fixed. So, to kill time I went into the microsoft store, which was literally empty. There were more staff than customers. I don't know why microsoft is opening stores.

Unverifiable anecdote from Apple fanboy does not equal data.

This comment borders on trollish. I have experienced crowded Apple stores myself in my own city (Beijing), two hour waits for repairs suck. That Apple stores have been very successful is hardly a secret or controversial. I can't really compare to Microsoft stores, since we don't have any here.

Disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee, hardly an Apple fanboy.

As a microsoft employee, can you buy an apple laptop use it at microsoft for work? for example doing presentations using macbook pro.

You weren't there today. That same Microsoft store was packed with people checking out the Surface and all the other new machines. The Apple store across the aisle was pretty quiet by comparison.

You should have seen the Santa Barbara Apple store in August on a Saturday evening. It was dead.

Apple stores can also have the irritating experience of five staff and six customers so you can't just buy the thing you came to the store for.

To be fair, in terms of Microsoft pieces from the big Apple bloggers, this comes off more fair than the stuff Gruber and MG write.

Overeager and abundant is at least better than useless or nonexistent.

That's pretty debatable and I will actually walk out of a store if staff continue to bother me after I have already politely said I do not need help. I have found that this happens all the time in consumer electronic stores. They circle you like vultures and butt in and explain things even after you have said you don't need or want their assistance.

Thank goodness for Internet shopping. Whenever I can I buy online specifically so I don't have to put up with sales people like the ones described in this article.

I routinely suffer going into a store and not being to able to find staff because they are busy chatting on the phone, or just openly not giving a shit. As much as I hated 'overeager' when I lived in the US, they could at least help me get the information or the product I was looking for.