Microsoft: You’re not cool; you’re the opposite of cool; stop making your employees dance (w/ vid)

Here’s a video of some Microsoft retail employees in their fake Apple Store in Mission Viejo, California, faking “spontaneity” via, of all things, some rendition of “The Electric Slide” gone horribly wrong and performed, of course, to the wrong song:


Direct link to video via YouTube here.

MacDailyNews Take: Don’t forget your minimum fifteen pieces of flair, you Apple Store rejects.

195 Comments

  1. They’re auditioning for Biggest Loser episode. Notice how few people are in the store? I would bet most are waiting on repairs and walking around in the meantime, how pathetic. I give this experiment 1-2 yrs iCal it!

  2. Sig Heil!
    There`s something inherently wrong with people dancing around all those MS swastikas. Well maybe if they`re good, they`ll be called to the chancellery to meet the Fuhrer himself.

    Oh I like the guy high tailing it outa there at 1:31

  3. I wonder if those poor employees were paid overtime to stay after hours, after the mall had closed, to rehearse this entire routine – so that someone who “just happened to have a video camera” could spontaneously film it and then release it on YouTube in the hopes that the whole world would know how fun it is to be a Microsoft Windows retail employee! Weee!

  4. They do the same dance when I eat at LoneStar Steakhouse. Embarrassing there and really embarrassing here. It reminds me of the band playing on the deck of the Titanic as it is moments away sinking into the deep freezing waters of the Atlantic. As long as it takes … the Unsinkable Microsoft.

  5. Would never have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.

    Sheesh, I guess some people will do anything to keep their job. LOL. And those people actually have to live in the OC.

  6. I knew the store layout was copied, the furnishing were copied, and the concept was copied. I didn’t know the employee uniforms, the font on the shirts, and the nametags hanging around their necks were copied. So pathetically sad.

  7. I thought it was kinda cute. The sales staff are pretty young and they seemed to mostly enjoy doing this — some customer’s even joined in. An awful lot of salespeople though, for the number of customers. They may have been dancing for their jobs.

  8. When laid off from his “real” job during the recession of 1955, faced with a wife and kids to feed, my father sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. He related stories about going in to the office in the morning before they would head out on their sales routes and singing vacuum cleaner songs to boost their morale.

    I hope that it looked a little more dignified than this.

    Fortunately, Dad got his job back, climbed the ladder, and retired with a nice pension and a 401(k), so for him, at least, there was a happily-ever-after. I wish the MicroSofties the best with that.

  9. HA ! you have to keep yourself occupied some way when you have NO customers…..

    Isn’t that the Black-Eyed Peas – the same song the little kid was lip-syncing on the web from an Apple store in NY ?????

    Its just Microsoft trying to be something their not…. AGAIN !

  10. Clearly the girl in green is leading them. Choreographer or Aerobics Instructor. One has to wonder – does she really work there or was she hired to come in and lead the dance. She doesn’t have an employee ID card. She’s the only one in a green shirt.
    The other thing one has to wonder is – did they rehearse this? Please say that they didn’t but I bet that they did!

    I wonder if they will all come around you and sing happy birthday to you on your birthday?

  11. How very sad for these employees. I guess when jobs are tight you have to take what you can get. Worse for the customers, who are so dim they think they should join in. Maybe that says it all.

  12. PC Apologist had it right. I was thinking it the whole time.

    If I were a customer and had to watch them for 5 minutes spinning in circles before being helped I would have left or atleast been thinking…ok when is this over, i just wanna get outta here.. Being a former Apple Emplyoee (LOVED it by the way), customers got PISSED when they werent helped immediately…well, we were swamped most of the time. Unlike this store.
    I can remember coutless times customers would interupt me when I was already with a customer for help.

  13. If this weren’t staged, and I was a customer in that store (not that I ever would be), I think it’d be really aggravating to have to put up with 5 minutes’ worth of that kind of distraction.

  14. @ chabig…

    MS didn’t copy Apple stores.

    In the few Apple stores I’ve been in, the display tables run the depth of the store (length-wise, from front to back).

    In the MS stores, they run the width of the store (from side to side).

    Totally different. Now that’s MS innovation!

    re the embarrassing video… at least the woman up front in the green top was worth watching ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />

  15. That would drive me crazy while I was trying to concentrate on my purchase. I go to a store (albeit never a MS store, but one with a fruit logo) to shop, not have to listen to the obnoxious sounds of Soul Train rejects clapping to overly-loud elevator music. I’d call it an annoying distraction, but that would be an insult to distractions.

  16. That went on FAR, FAR, FAR too long.
    At least an Applebees Happy Birthday clap song (or other chain restaurant happy clap ‘n’ dance) only lasts about 30 seconds.

    4:44 of that torture was just painful.

    Microsoft: “Your innovation, our painfully lame ass copy.”

  17. This is horrible, how much can you lower yourself to keep the job?
    Shouldn’t they be making a sale instead of dancing?
    How about helping some customers.
    I guess they want to keep customer’s attention away from those ugly products.

  18. hey, has anyone actually been to this store? how busy is it? what kind of help can you get at the Guru bar?

    haven’t seen any real “review” of the new MS that report what actually goes on …

  19. @DM – well said.
    This is about as comfortable and sincere as the servers sing happy birthday to you in a restaurant.

    I have a better idea for them. Just clear the entire floor of the worthless merchandise and start teaching line dancing lessons. They’ll draw in more people.

  20. Pathetic. Dancing for almost 5 minutes while there are customers waiting to be served? Notice the guy in front of the camera with the red shirt. I’m surprised he stayed. That would have made me upset enough to leave, however I would never darken the door of an MS store to begin with.

  21. Man o man….this has got to be the worst thing that MS has done (next to copying Mac OS X). I echo the sentiments of every poster here. This is not only ugly…its just down right fugly.

  22. At least they could have handed everyone a piece of cake with a candle in it. Isn’t that the usual reward for enduring that?

    Best part of this was reading everyone’s hysterical reply posts here, I think we out did ourselves this time gang.

  23. This is what they do because there are no customers buying anything. The people sitting in the background are mall walkers who spotted an empty place to rest.

    You imagine there are some layoffs coming at this store? It’s like the Sony store got down to two employees talking to each other all day until they finally shut it down.

  24. When these stores close and these folks are out of work they will have a new “skill” for their resumes. And when it is announced they are all out of work please remember this video before saying how sad it is.

  25. It’s telling that Microsoft Store employees have the time to do what is nearly a five-minute dance. Sales must be so-so. I wonder if these “Wannabe Apple” customers are even aware of how pathetic Microsoft seems to be. Or are they in their own reality distortion field?

  26. What the fsck are they dancing about? Lousy products? A culture of imitation? A company that violates every law it can get away with? Mediocrity (at best)? Conning consumers? I just don’t get it.

  27. It’s like a dork who sees two kids get into a playful, spontaneous water fight. He then runs up to ask them if they can come over to his house at 4:00 to have a playful, spontaneous water fight there.

    Just give Microsoft the damned wedgie it deserves, tie its gym shoes together, throw them over an overhead wire, and send them packing. They are sooooo uncool.

  28. Hey, let’s do a viral marketing campaign. Something everyone will forward to their friends. Okay, let’s dance repetitively… like that guy on the how to dance like Britney DVD. Yeah. And do it half-@$$. Yeah, like we don’t care. And, most importantly, make it long. People love long repetitive videos about products they’re only mildly curious about. It’s gonna be huge!

  29. Hey! I know what they’re dancing to:

    You let the viruses in
    You let the viruses out
    You get some IT dude
    to flush the trojans out
    You hand the dude your wallet
    and he takes $200 out – yeah
    That’s what Windows is about

  30. That dance is great but… can I get some freekin’ help here by system has blue screened and all of you… I mean ALL OF YOU are too busy pissin’ around!!!

    GET BACK TO WORK AND HELP ME… remember me?… the customer!

  31. Oh, wait, I get it.
    Microsoft Promotions had an idea;

    (In the board room)
    Chad: “We’ll have our retail drones, er, … employees break out in a song and dance routine so utterly horrifying, that anyone standing in line for service, will be compelled to flee the store, never to return!
    Then we can report almost nil service and return rates for the products we sell!”

    Brook: “That’s a great idea, Chad. Funny that I told you that very idea this morning, over coffee, you BASTARD!” …

    *chair fight ensues amongst much shouting*

  32. @Toastie, looked to me that the girl in white at 2:14 put something in her bag, and I’m fairly sure she was new into the store just a little earlier… Could well have shoplifted something… Difficult to tell for sure since you don’t get a clear look at her before you see her shove something into her bag.

    As for this being “spontaneous”? Pure BS. This is clearly planned.

  33. On watching it again (I know, how sad is that?)
    I’m not entirely sure that the girl in white w/ the bag actually shoplifted – or that she is even a customer.
    At 1:56 you see her literally running into the store with the alleged customers in black and blue who also start dancing. At exactly the same time?

    I think all 3 of them are shills. They can’t even get costumers to dance with ’em – they have to get employees to pretend.

    This just gets sadder, and sadder…

  34. Maybe if these Microsoft employees spent their time educating people in the mall about the fact that most of the mice, keyboards and monitors that they sell will work perfectly well on their Macintosh they’d be too busy making sales. But then if they were too busy actually selling stuff then they couldn’t invent stupid dances and look oh…so…lame and bored on YouTube.

  35. Yup, this is a pure example of Microsoft. Screw the customer for five minutes while we TRY to dance in a store. Ignore the customer for show. Love the concept. Keep it up Microsoft with Ballhead.

    I just have to go with the customer service without the fake entertainment and where the products focus on the user and not the whims of a software company that loves flash and awe- awe damn it crashed a gain Microsoft!

    Apple yet again gains market share at the hands of Microsoft. It is getting way to easy!

  36. It’s hipnotic.. I want to look away… but like a train wreck, I just can’t…

    Not only would Apple never do this.. there’s no room in an Apple Store for two dozen folks each to use 50 square feet of floor to dance…

  37. They do that at Johnny Rocket, a 50’s-themed hamburger franchise. That’s the only other place I’ve seen this sort of thing, though other posters say they’ve seen it elsewhere.

    One does tend to feel bad for employees forced to do this. At least at Johnny Rocket, it sort of ties in to 50’s music and the whole period feel. But here it’s just aimless and awful. And you can’t escape the feeling all this razzle dazzle is meant to cover up the simple fact that the products aren’t of the same caliber as you-know-who’s.

  38. @Xan and Macdust

    Why would she steal (I presume a copy of Win7) when Microsoft`s marketing partners at the Piratebay freely give away special edition copies with all the latest and hippest malware?

    BTW it does look like she lifted something
    +1

  39. They were doing the celebration dance for the 100 Million th PC infected by at least 65,560.98 viruses, netting the cyber criminals a whopping record 358 Billion dollars in stolen passwords, credit card u name it…. just last month…

    …not to mention the 948 Billion dollars Windows OS is costing the entire globe every month in lost productivity, doing defraggs, reinstalls, virus scans, reformats, and just about any other stupid thing!

  40. Couple’a things:
    1. I think the video wall is cool – and how exactly is that a rip-off from an Apple store?
    2. All I kept thinking was, “… when is it going to end?” [Referring to the “dance”.]

  41. This is why unions are necessary — this has got to be some sort of violation of labor law somewhere.

    Those poor souls will never get a date again — assuming that just the fact they work in a M$ store doesn’t turn off any prospective partners…

  42. Who do you say they were? Moonies? Hare Krishnans? Sure looks like it … But seriously, if this isn’t cult behaviour, I don’t know what is.

    MDN word, where, as in where in all the blue blazes did this insanely, ridiculously inane idea come from?

  43. Some of our malls have been doing this for months now. They would play their store’s jingle and every sales personnel not engaged with a customer dances to the tune of it. Happens every 4 or 5 in the afternoon, depending on the company.

  44. Sweet Jesus, make it stop.

    No, seriously, there was no way I could have watched that to the end. Those poor kids looked seriously embarrassed to me and not having any fun at all. Were they under orders to have themselves such a ‘good time’?

    Lots of fatties in the keep-fit class there too, looking scarily like the evil spawn of Ballmer. “You too can lose weight at work”…

  45. Instead of dancing around like idiots what happened to spending time offering customer service?

    I know, I know, I know we of the Apple scene would not wish to even poke a stick at “Microsoft’s customer service” but some of us are still forced to use Microsoft software for whatever reason.

  46. I like the way that all of their shirts are bright garish colours – makes them look like their wearing Star Trek uniforms ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />

    Though it’s a shame all the ones in red shirts are gonna be the first to die soon (probably crushed when the ‘View screen of Death’ falls off the back wall).

    Much like Microsoft themselves – Make it so…

  47. Looks like this is another Microsoft “viral” marketing campaign gone horribly wrong.

    http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/18/microsoft_retail_store_gets_odd_viral_marketing_buzz.html

    Seems like the Whois for “Brad Slavin’s” domain just so happens to list marketing site http://www.webheat.com as his company. Yet he claims he “just happened” to be there when the dance “spontaneously” broke out.

    “Brad Slavin” also seems to be associated with a few other sites, some of a significantly less reputable nature: http://www.google.com/search?q=6038BlueDawnTrail

  48. The reason Churchill and Roosevelt didn’t kill Hitler in WW2 was that he was more valuable to the allied war effort as a live military idiot than dead and someone more competent in charge. Same goes for Balmer and company. Sheesh what a bunch of idiots.

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