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Doing a spot of pre-Christmas shopping, I visited Apple's flagship store on London's Regent Street for the first time. It's quite an experience. I've always admired the way Apple's product design breaks apart traditional 'IT' concepts of form and function, and the Apple approach to retail is just as iconoclastic.
Gone are the dour aisles and the spotty surly staff of traditional electrical outlets. Instead there's plenty of space, plenty of machines and plenty of knowledgeable sales staff. So far, so enticing. But what really impressed me was that Apple seems to have figured out that what customers want is information.
To this end, in addition to the products, the shop features a seminar theatre where people can bring their own machines in order to follow along with tutorials and demos from Apple staff. And there's a help desk where customers can bring ailing machines and queries.
What it reminded me of, most of all, is the new breed of libraries where facilities for encouraging knowledge exchange are just as important as ...