Microsoft forges ahead with retail store expansion plans

The company is continuing its transformation from a simple software company with the announcement of its first six stores planned for 2013.

Microsoft unveiled the first six locations for its next wave of retail stores for next year.

The company has been in the middle of a broader transformation to further connect with consumers beyond its Windows software. That has included moving even further into the hardware business with its own tablet, the Surface, going beyond its Xbox 360 video game console and the ill-fated Zune media player. A key part of that strategy has been its growing chain of retail stores, which give it a chance to directly interact with people.

How the Bar Code Took Over the World

In 1948 a supermarket executive came to the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia with a request. He wanted a technology that could encode information about his products. Two graduate students, Bernard Silver and N. Joseph Woodland, took up the challenge. Woodland became obsessed and dropped out of school to concentrate on it. That winter he was sitting on Miami Beach, dragging his fingers in the sand, when he had an idea for a series of lines of different widths that functioned like elongated versions of the dots and dashes of Morse Code—in other words, a bar code.

Woodland died on Dec. 9, but his invention is so successful that it’s almost invisible. Cereal boxes, soup cans, books, and magazines all have universal product codes. Anything you buy in a supermarket or department store does, too. Companies like Amazon.com (AMZN) use multiple bar codes to track packages. They’re so common we barely even recognize them as technology.

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