It appears that Microsoft may be preparing to launch a number of ‘holiday stores’ in major metropolitan areas for the end-of-the-year sales rush. If you are Microsoft, what’s one of the largest challenges that you face, looking forward towards the conclusion of 2012? It’s not proving to people that the Surface is a good-looking device. It does that on its own. However, explaining what’s a Windows 8 and what happened to a user’s Start Button is a whole separate challenge. Microsoft has its own retail stores. Not that many of them, frankly, but enough that they are no longer oddities, and their openings no longer seeming one-offs. Read the full story at The Next Web.