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Best Buy Acquires SpeakEasy
spazimodo writes "From the announcement e-mail from Speakeasy CEO Bruce Chatterley: 'I am pleased to announce that Speakeasy has been acquired by Best Buy, an innovative and growing Fortune 100 company and the top consumer electronics retailer in North America. This is a significant milestone for our company as our new relationship will help us realize our goals of becoming the No. 1 provider of voice and data solutions to small businesses. It is important to note that though Speakeasy will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, we will continue to operate as a standalone, independent operating division with headquarters in Seattle.' As a longtime Speakeasy customer, it's too bad to see their business moving in this direction. Back in the day when I called up their support with a problem, and mentioned I was using an OpenBSD box as a firewall/gateway the response was: 'cool!' — slightly different from the response Comcast or Verizon would give. I can't imagine they'll be able to maintain that independence, and there's no way I'm paying a premium for Internet service to Best Buy."
Best Buy did the same thing with The Musicland Group (Media Play, Sam Goodie etc..) Media Play was one of the best jobs i ever had. Everyone got along, corporate realized that every store location served different demographics and let the stores cater to those needs. Then Comes best buy with their one size fits all mantra. All of the sudden all employees have to sell so many "replay cards" a month or risk termination. They sucked to fun out of that place in less then a year. Next thing you know MusicLand is out of business. I hate Best Buy.
I felt like I had been punched when I saw the email this morning.
silly to feel like that over an ISP, but dang, speakeasy was awesome, and best buy--well...not so much a fan. Like their stores, but that's about it.
I specifically chose Speakeasy for my DSL because of how open they are with customer usage patterns and configurations. Like the submitter, I call up and say I have a Linux box as my gateway and they love it. They don't cap bandwidth, block ports, etc. I'm sure they'll claim "nothing will change" but I cannot imagine Best Buy leaving this alone... They'll require Vista for connections or something silly like that (for "security reasons").
Sigh. Time to start shopping around for small DSL providers again.
--- witty signature
I recommended Speakeasy to all my clients, and just about everyone I knew, because I had amazing service from them. Best Buy I've never had anything but shitty service from. As of a few minutes ago, I'm recommending everyone I know steer very clear, and all my clients who are currently using Speakeasy to be prepared for when things start collapsing.
From my perspective, I absolutely *loved* Media Play in their heyday. I used to go there all the damned time. For one thing, they had by far the best selection of anime I could find back when anime was starting to become big. And from that, I would go there and browse books and CDs. I'd occasionally buy a video game there. And they always had other products that made me go 'ooooh' Then they went downhill. Getting pinged every time about a Replay card got annoying very, very quickly. It seemed like their stores slowly went downhill in terms of cleanliness and display of product. I started going to other stores for books and video games. I was already buying less anime. It really came down to the fact that I stopped caring about Media Play, and didn't really notice them go out of business.
If you believe all that, I've got a bridge to sell you. As soon as the deal is closed, BestBuy will be imposing their corporate policies on Speakeasy. First thing will be HR policies -- those will cause many of the best people at Speakeasy to jump ship. Then they'll start cutting services that aren't part of their "core" -- since it's part of "Best Buy for Business", that probably means residential services will be going, piece by piece. Customer service? Best Buy insist on cost cutting there too. Somewhere along the line Mr. Chatterly will take his money and run. Things will get worse, until Best Buy sells the what's left of the company to AT&T or Verizon.