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Best Buy Abandoning "Optimization" Service?
ddillman writes "According to The Consumerist, Best Buy is apparently dropping some of its 'optimization' services, and will instead provide the 'Best Buy Software Installer,' a new tool that the company says will 'radically simplify how you set up and customize your new PC or upgrade an existing one.' Translation: instead of you paying Best Buy to delete trialware from your new PC, Best Buy will get paid by software makers to try to get you to install it. A page on the Best Buy web site states that the new installation tool will be available January 17th, and 'gives you choices and options to configure your computer, and saves you time by making it easy to discover new software, then download and install with a single click.' According to an alleged internal Best Buy document obtained by a technology blog, Best Buy stands to make an extra $5 per PC just by including BBSI."
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Um, my guess would be millions. For a lot of people, Best Buy is the only physical retailer selling computers that have decent specs at a decent price. Yeah, some people will buy things online, but many times you can find pre-built systems cheaper at Best Buy than at any other retailer online or otherwise. It is really, really hard to beat a $300 laptop that does everything an average person wants while having a decent sized screen (15 inch) and decent sized keyboard.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The margins on PCs are ridiculously thin.
That's why manufacturers have resorted to bundling crapware, and now apparently retailers as well.
Geek Squad employee here, I read an internal document that said the complete opposite. I thought about making a copy for myself and taking it home, but I'm not quite that ballsy.
From that memo, it seems that Best Buy admits that there's not much of a speed boost in it, certainly not $40 worth, but they still justify it as a time-saving procedure. That is, if you're some CEO and have a shitload of money but little time, then you don't want to waste it uninstalling trials of NetZero and Microsoft Works (which we don't actually uninstall anymore, we just prevent it from starting up automatically, since some customers complained that their new computers came without the great software trials that HP/Sony/Toshiba advertised).
It didn't seem like they wanted to stop the service, although they DID remind everyone that optimizing more computers than are likely to be sold and then making customers pay for them even if they don't want it is illegal and a bait-and-switch. Which is great, because the managers here in a central North Carolina store were seriously considering optimizing 90% of stock and trying to get rich that way. Bastards.
At the local computer shop I work at, we make a killing cleaning up after Geek Squad's mess for their disgruntled ex-customers. Keep it up BB! Thanks to you business is booming for those of us who actually care about the work we do instead of just shaking customers upside down by their ankles.
Funny, I got my first Windows PC (A 486DX running Win3.1) because the guy that had it owed me $100 and had gotten it full of malware and didn't know how to fix it. He figured it was a good excuse to lose the debt and at the same time give him a reason to shell out nearly $3K! on a brand new P100Mhz to play...was Heretic or Hexen first? Ehhh one of the two.
I got into doing PC repair for a living when I stopped by my local shop to score some RAM sticks and heard the boss cussing his brains out. He got stuck with a truckload of Gateway Astro from some guy that owed him a grand, and while they all had restore discs no OS was installed and it refused to take the restore discs. I told him "why don't you just use a standard Win98 disc?" and he swore to me because of the funky USB everything on those it couldn't be done. I bet him the RAM sticks I wanted I could do it, and after the Win98 install simply stuck in the restore discs and installed the drivers manually. He handed me the sticks and said "Grab a seat, there are 40 more of those in the back". I ended up being "the scary biker guy in the back that does great work" for 5 years. It was funny to hear little old ladies go "is the scary biker guy here?"
But back to the topic at hand, the problem with Worst Buy (other than they suck of course) and these other groups that offer "optimization" is they don't actually understand the customer. I too offer optimization, and my customers love it and talk about me like I walk on water. The secret? The average customer does NOT want a faster PC! I repeat, they do NOT want a faster PC they want an easier to use PC. So what I do is basically set them up a "toaster". Any customer that pays the $55 for optimization gets a PC that autoupdates, has AV set to autoscan and autoupdate, it automatically cleans the registry and temp files, defrags itself, has all the codecs (thanks to K-Lite Mega) installed, flash, Java, .NET, Silverlight, all installed, Firefox with ABP and ForecastFox installed, and finally Go Open Office and GNUCash.
When I'm done all the customer has to do is "flip a switch and go" and THAT, not squeezing an extra couple of notches in some benchmark, is what I've found the customers REALLY want in a PC. Unlike my old boss I don't get folks coming back in a month or two infected like a Bangkok whore, but I have found the referrals more than make up for that. Give folks a good value, let them know you care about more than just their wallet, and they will go out of their way to brag on you and send business your way. Worst Buy doesn't care how bad your experience is, once they have your money and that is why they have a bad rep. Well that and the shitty service, pervs that go through your files looking for porn, geeks that don't know the right end of a screwdriver....
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Former GS employee here:
The whole "pre-setup" thing was a crock from the get-go. It was SUPPOSEDLY so people who wanted the service could get a computer faster, but it just ended up being wasted labor. Myself and MANY other employees railed against this practice from the start, and of course management refused to listen.
What would happen is we would get the ads for the next week a few days early. Of the notebooks in the ad, a certain percentage of each we got in were to have the pre-installed garbage done to it. This started out fairly low, but soon we were being pushed to have 40% of each model done this way. And of course the people on the sales floor were told to push the HELL out of these systems. Why? Because technically, if the customer truly did not want the service, we were to restore it back to factory, or simply not charge them for it. Obviously this becomes a problem when a lot of customers don't want the service and they end up getting it for free. This is where they stopped having the in-store people do said service because it was wasted labor to do something for free, and also wasted labor to remove something the customer didn't want. The solution? A heavy internal push to have all of this done by the much-hated "Agent Jonny Utah".
Who is "Agent Jonny Utah", you might ask (other than a crappy Point Break reference)? It's nothing more than Geek Squad Outsourcing. They hook the computer up to the network, and use a customized version of LogMeIn to let someone in Bangalore or wherever do their job for them. Only half the time they don't do anywhere NEAR what a store employee would do. For example, when performing the service upon request, we would remove ALL trialware, make sure ALL updates were applied, and run a few scripts to generally make things a bit quicker and less resource-hungry. I could do about 5-8 computers at a time and have them all done inside of an hour. Agent Outsource? It would be up to 2 hours before they would even TOUCH the system, and then they would proceed to install the updates and give it a GWB-esque "Mission Complete." This meant we STILL had to do work to the computer when they were done, because they didn't really do anything to begin with.
AJU is also the reason you don't take your computer to the store to get it cleaned up. The VAST majority of the time, they will just hook it up remotely (unless it's so infected it can't get an IP, in which case they'll just want to do a restore) and let the remote guys take a whack at it. Surprise, surprise, more often than not they botch the job. And of course when it took 3x as long because of having to re-do the work, customers got upset and WE got the blame. We were NEVER to let the customer even THINK that the machine was worked on by someone other than the people they see behind the counter.
And this is why there is such a backlash anymore. Of the people who were there when I started in GS, only one is left. In my store (not sure about any others), we thought of ourselves as techs first and foremost. Those with that attitude were forced to change or leave, as they don't want techs. They want salesmen wearing a shirt and tie using the perception of knowledge to hock more crap. In the end, all we were there for was to sell services, but not perform them. Software? Have AJU do it. Hardware? Do they have a service plan? Ship it to Louisville. Only a manufacturer warranty? Give them the MFR number.
When I was new to GS, it was a culture of "help the customer, get them what they need, and build lasting relationships." When I left, it had become nothing but "milk as much money out of as many people as you possibly can."
On a final note, if you DO make the mistake of taking your PC to them for service, point blank ask them if THEY will be cleaning it, or if they're just going to hook it up to have some hackjob in Hyderabad run a few scripts and say it's done...
I did a reinstall on a friend's HP Vista laptop, and I was shocked and appalled by the amount of junk on there. The long interactive Flash video that plays when the computer is first booted would also be extremely misleading to a novice, as it appears to be offering software choices, but it's really just a bunch of advertising. This was far worse than any Dell or Sony I have worked on in the past.
The reinstall was needed after I attempted to work on her computer and noticed she didn't even have SP1 for Vista yet. I ran all the MS updates, and ended up with a corrupted NTOSKRNL.EXE and an unbootable Vista at the end of the process. Wiped all that junk and installed a fresh Windows 7 Ultimate. :)
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
CompUSA used to do that ($20), but we'd actually optimize the various settings (all the tweaks that a power user would do to increase performance), remove the crapware, install all the updates, activate Windows (and Office or whatever else was bought/came with the machine), activate and update the AV/AS software, configure the network settings so the machine would go online right out of the box (keep in mind this was back in the day when Windows post-setup would pop up an idiotic list of choices on how to get on the Internet that made little to no sense to the average user, followed by the first time you ran IE, it trying to get you to sign up to AOL or connect to their site to choose an ISP... you know... their older, useless, "sell someone else's Internet service for them" Internet Connection Wizard crap, and so on... and it was never mandatory for the customer.
Wasn't too bad of a deal back then, considering just how difficult it was to even get online for the average user without being suckered into an AOL or Earthlink subscription (especially on the HPs which included their own Internet Wizard and post-install full screen pop-ups that hitting exit would just reload a different variant of them until you did that a couple times or went through the steps).
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Since all Vista/Win7 DVDs are the same now, I just download my MSDN image and use our keys to install.
(different) ex-gs-er here:
In general, for things like RAM and HDD we'd just do it in store. If it was something else, or we didn't know, the motto was "ship it out" so we could get more stuff done.
Also, if we sent something out that turned out to not have a hardware problem, the customer was stuck with a ~$35 non-refundable shipping fee.
wow that was kind of an asshole response.
you can assume you didnt read anything else i read, so just STFU.
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
Please, you are just making yourself look silly at this point.
Viruses are widely considered to be a subset of malware (malware literally meaning "malicious software"). From wikipedia:
You might have a different definition of malware, but that definition is pretty much your own. The definition to you seem to be presenting for "malware" seems more in line with "trojans", programs which pretend to be something they are not (you know, like the trojan horse of mythology... no, who am I kidding, you probably don't know).
If you were just claiming that spyware alone only started to become a real issue in the 2000's, then you would have a point. Please note however that the original poster never mentioned spyware at all, but rather just the generic term 'malware'. In a feeble attempt to get some modpoints, you attacked his statement with the intent to contradict. Not a terrible plan, since counterpoints to posts with lots of modpoints also tend to get lots of modpoints themselves. Unfortunetly you know a lot less than you think you know, and you just ended up making yourself look like a fool.
What is disturbing at this point, is that you haven't even bothered to look any of these terms up yet.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)