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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."
Yeah, I hate mergers too. I just made a contract with NTL internet cable provider, which was merging with Telewest, and after two months it became Virgin Media after being bought by the Virgin group... geez, it seems UK will soon be Virgin Islands or something alike.
:)
The problem with mergers is that they often lead to less competition (less companies, or the same number of companies both all owned by the same few groups). I hope that at least speakeasy does not stop offering they cool bandwidth service
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
quandary, not quandry.
It was super sad when that coffehouse burnt down. I remember walking by and being shocked when i saw the speak easy gutted. That place was really cool. A good part of Seattle.