Microsoft closed its Microsoft Store locations around the world in March, due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. It has now decided that these physical stores will not re-open. It sounds like Microsoft Store employees will be kept on in digital, training, and generally helping small business and enterprise with Microsoft products. However, prematurely winding up its stores (all 83 of them), including its Microsoft Experience Centres in London, NYC, Sydney, and Redmond campus locations, is going to cost the firm approximately $450M, or $0.05 per share.
Since the physical store closures, Microsoft has kept its retail store staff busy helping serve customers by remotely providing sales, training, and support. Microsoft says that its team members have hosted more than 14,000 online workshops and summer camps and more than 3,000 virtual graduations too.
"We deliberately built teams with unique backgrounds and skills that could serve customers from anywhere. The evolution of our workforce ensured we could continue to serve customers of all sizes when they needed us most, working remotely these last months," explained Microsoft Corporate Vice President David Porter. "Speaking over 120 languages, their diversity reflects the many communities we serve. Our commitment to growing and developing careers from this talent pool is stronger than ever."
As physical stores went offline, Microsoft asserts that it has enjoyed "significant growth," of its digital storefronts including Microsoft.com, and stores on Xbox and Windows. Thanks to the extra manpower, Microsoft has introduced new online services over recent months including; 1:1 video chat support, online tutorial videos, and virtual workshops, and promises more digital solutions are on the way.
Windows File Recovery CLI application
Another little news nugget today is that Microsoft has released the Windows File Recovery command line tool via the Microsoft store. Once downloaded and installed you can run this tool via the command prompt as below:
winfr source-drive: destination-drive: [/switches]
You can find a full list of switches on Microsoft's support page. As for its scope, the app can recover lost/deleted files from your local FAT, exFAT, ReFS or NTFS storage device (including internal drives, external drives, and USB devices) that are no longer in the recycle bin. It doesn't work with network shares or cloud storage. This app requires Windows 10 build 19041 or later.
