I took a trip to a mall yesterday and got to stop in a Microsoft store, not my reason for going, but a pleasant surprise I had to check out. It reminded me exactly of an Apple store right down to the style of name tags hanging from the necks of the employees. That's not a bad thing – it seems to work for Apple. Then I wondered if you can patent a store layout (I'm sure Apple would have tried…) First difference in the store layout – every 'station' had a barstool to sit at. Microsoft wants me to sit and play and Apple makes everyone stand.

My first thought was I know what Apple sells – hardware (and an experience). What does Microsoft sell? Software (first thought) and XBOX and Skype and Office. So I should see a little carousel full of gift cards to purchase software downloads, XBOX Live and Skype credits, right? They were selling hardware – Dell, Samsung, etc. Nice. When I thought about it – other stores sell products they don't make, so why not Microsoft? Okay, cool. I got to play with a Windows 7 tablet and laptop and my kids found XBOX Kinect even though we have one at home. The Samsung Series 7 tablet was nice and it was HUGE, the guy working at the store tells me it's actually more of a laptop than a tablet. Sweet. Not in my budget for $1,200 but I can see a million uses for the thing. Next time I'm going in and playing around when I don't have my entire family with me. I love the concept of the store and want to reacquaint myself with devices running Windows. Still wanting to get ahold of an Android tablet first though.

Guess what else the Microsoft store was promoting. BING! Whaaaat? The first kiosk I find in the store is challenging me to compare Bing to Google? *GAME ON* Of course once my husband starting talkin' smack I had to jump on the challenge and check it out. First thing I searched was my own name. I think we freaked out the woman working the station. I'm guessing average mall-walking mom's don't have the SERPs I do. <grin>

I could easily tell the Bing results, but was ticked at how stripped down the Google results were. I know I wasn't signed in or using Search Plus Your World (which I love). Safe search was set to high. What I didn't realize until researching it now was that the head-to-head "excludes ads, Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph." With the exception of the ads, not a fair comparison to me at all. I know I wouldn't be logging in with my account on a public machine just to test out SPYW, but the results also didn't seem to account for location easily picked up from the IP address.

Take the Bing challenge yourself at http://www.BingItOn.com/ I've tried it from home in Crome Incognito mode to see if I could get close to the results I had in the store. What do you think?

(For the record not only am I an Apple customer, I am a Google fangirl. I also lived in the Microsoft world on an global enterprise level for 15 years. I also regularly use Bing and a handful of other search engines outside of Google Search for my job.)

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