MicrosoftMicrosoft Store

Unless you’re living under a rock, or just aren’t as big of a nerd as me, you may not know that Microsoft is planning on competing with Apple Stores with their own retail stores set to open soon across the country.

With these new stores, Microsoft is releasing a new logo. Whether the logo is for the retail outlets only, or a company-wide rebranding is unclear, although it appears as if it’s just for the retail stores.

It’s a secret to noone that knows me that Microsoft isn’t my favorite company in the world. I think their Windows OS is far inferior to the Mac counterpart and in playing catchup, they’ve blatantly imitated Mac OS X in their Vista release. That said – I have to give Microsoft props – this logo is a big improvement over their current mark/marks. I don’t think anyone would miss the waving-flag-window-thing if they just lost it completely for this new mark. To me, that old waving symbol represents stagnant software, viruses, clunky interfaces and general incompetency. The new mark feels fresh and modern while staying true to the very recognizable established brand.

The mark looks good in execution on the teaser photo Microsoft released on their Twitter of a retail outlet opening soon in Arizona. I can almost see this logo as a triple-overlayed backlit colored glass sculptural thing in the stores. It’s Microsoft so I doubt that’ll happen, but we can dream. It’s nice to see them do something right visually after their recent disasterous Bing logo.

It’ll be interesting to see how successful the retail stores become. I’m all for Microsoft succeeding a little bit because it will just push Apple to continue to innovate and make even more superior products for me to continue to empty my wallet on.

(via Engadget)