Microsoft is shuttering its only UK retail store, less than six years after the doors of the Oxford Circus location were first opened to the public.
El Reg showed up with the rest of the public back in the halcyon days of 2019 to gawp at Microsoft’s attempt to be as cool as Apple over three floors and 22,000 square feet.
Less than six years later, after transforming into an “Experience Center” for Microsoft’s products, the software and cloud biz has elected to shut the space for good, with the final closure scheduled for February.
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: “To better align with its focus on digital growth, Microsoft has decided to exit the lease at the Microsoft Experience Center in London early. We regularly review our locations and our workforce to ensure we are aligning to market opportunities and make changes to meet the demands of the business.”
In hindsight, the Oxford Circus store was doomed from the outset. Setting aside a dubious business case – Microsoft had spent the previous few years rolling back its consumer operations until little more than Microsoft 365 and Xbox remained – the following year, the pandemic arrived, swiftly locking the doors.
In 2020, Microsoft shuttered its bricks-and-mortar operation worldwide, but London escaped the cut. Kind of. The store was resurrected as one of three “Microsoft Experience Centers,” alongside sites in New York and Sydney, and reopened in July 2021.
The theory was that the Oxford Circus space could be used for business meetings or partner events. In 2021, an optimistic Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: “Our Microsoft Experience Centers were created to provide customers a way to experience our products in person. We use these spaces to test and experiment, and continue to evolve the experience based on customer feedback.”
That evolution has been, it appears, to an early exit from the lease rather than the showcase for the company’s products and services that was hoped for a few short years ago. It’s perhaps understandable – the last thing Microsoft would want is for customers to have somewhere to show up in person and vent their collective spleen over its decision to increase charges to pay for a technology they didn’t ask for. ®
