Apple Stores worldwide are shutting down for an hour (10-11 Pacific) today to watch a live stream of a memorial for Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, company-rescuer, and industry-revolutionizer who died two weeks ago. The memorial will take place at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California.

Less than 24 hours after this solemn moment, Microsoft will proudly launch a new Microsoft Store in University Village, complete with Apple-esque sleek decor and casually dressed youngish staff. The timing is unfortunate, and certainly not Microsoft's fault, but sort of epitomizes Microsoft's hapless tendency to re-do much of what Apple does except not quite as well or successfully (iPod: Zune, OS X: Vista, iPhone: Windows Phone, Apple Store: Microsoft Store, and so on).

Bill Gates attended a private memorial for Jobs last weekend, and surely there's ample respect for the man at Microsoft. But when fellow memorial attendee Stephen Fry tweeted: "I don't know that there was ever a more beautiful memorial service. Everyone who spoke did so with such passion and love and simplicity," he sort of summed up the difference between Apple and Microsoft.

Passion and love and simplicity are indeed what drove much of Apple's success under Jobs. And it's routine and obligation and complexity that often seem to have lurked behind too many of Microsoft's less-successful moments. But perhaps passion (if not profit: Apple stores average more than 3 times the sales per square foot of Microsoft Stores) will be at the heart of the new Microsoft Store location, which has been enticing shoppers with a Kinect booth for about two weeks. The regular season–retired Kasey Keller will even be on hand (er, foot?) to play Kinect with people on opening day.

So is Microsoft finally integrating innovation into its copycat retail outlets? You'll have to check out the new store on Thursday to see for yourself.

As further incentive to attend tomorrow, the first 200 people in the door will get two complimentary tickets to either a Black Keys performance on Friday at 7:00 or a OneRepublic show on Saturday at 2:30. You can get more information about the store opening at the Facebook page or Twitter account or actual Microsoft Store page--or at least theoretically you can do the latter; it errored out when we tried (yes really). Ah, good ol' Microsoft.

University Village Microsoft Store Opening, 9:30 a.m., Thursday, October 20, University Village (2624 NE University Village Street)

Filed in Miscellaneous, News and tagged apple, apple store, bill gates, microsoft, microsoft store, steve jobs

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