Having worked for Circuit City back in the 1990s, when the company was the #1 retailer of consumer electronics and had a healthy balance sheet and was looking quite good, I have to say it's somewhat depressing to see them go. Even after I left, I always tried to give them some business (it sure beat Worst Buy and Wally World for electronics). In a bit of irony, however, I still remember those morning meetings back in the 90s when management would brag to us about the company's financial durability, and "deep pockets", and every now and then they'd read off what they referred to as their, "obituary of electronics stores" that have previously went under. I never thought they'd eventually add their own name to that list.
I think there are several poor business decisions that the company made in the past 10 years or so that can explain why they failed. Starting with their venture into the DIVX fiasco (hint: if your "partner" in a business venture is a law firm, it's probably one to avoid). They probably could have recovered after they finally killed DIVX, if it wasn't for also deciding to get out of the major appliances business. Talk about pure stupidity there -- you see, most major appliances customers are older people, homeowners, with money, and while they're buying that refrigerator or dishwasher today, in six months, they'll probably be looking for a new wide screen television or laptop. Getting rid of appliances just eliminated a huge segment of the market, and lots of sales!
Mistake #3 was just simply not figuring out your basic store structure. After I left the company, every time I walked into the store, I swear to God, they had a new format and arrangement! I could never find anything! If you can't figure out something as simple as this, you're doomed. Going along with this, Firedog was simply at least three years too late in responding to the Geek Squad -- Best Buy won that one easily.
The final nail in the coffin (and I'm sure this has already been stated in this thread somewhere, but I'll put it here just for my own completeness) is firing all of their experienced salespeople and replacing them with non-commissioned, inexperienced, Wal-Mart-esque, clerks. I do understand that ultimately, they had to ditch the commissioned model, simply because of the change in the marketplace. But they went about it totally wrong -- a better solution would be to take advantage of the high turnover rate in retail as it is, and just not hire new commissioned salespeople, and grandfather the experienced ones, who can then be a huge resource to the newer salespeople in teaching them the ropes.
So, it's sad to see them go, but not surprising based on their business decisions of the past 10 years. I did learn a lot from working there back in the 90s, especially regarding computers, installations, and technology in general, so I thank them for that. In the meantime, I guess I'll get my electronics from Newegg or TigerDirect. At least until some new entrepreneur decides to open up a Buy More,...;-)
I certainly would not say that, "Facebook killed TV." Grandmas to 14-year-old girls were buying computers quite a few years before Facebook even existed.
So, let's just get the effing show on the effing road, dudes,... I bought my DTV converter, with coupons, over a year ago, and still get a crappy signal because 5% of the numb-nuts put it off until the last minute,... So all the DTV stations around here only broadcast signals at 25% power. So hurry the frak up so the rest of us get a decent DTV signal!
According to this report, published yesterday, Serenity was in the lead with more than 66,000 votes, with Colbert in second overall with 29,000 votes. The trailing vote-getters include Xenu (9,200), Earthrise (4,200), Legacy (3,500) and Venture (3,200). Of course, these numbers are from yesterday when only 169,000 people voted. There's now 249,449 votes, so Colbert could very well be in the lead,... =)
On a more personal note, I could be happy with either Colbert or Serenity -- while I am a huge fan of Stephen Colbert, I am also a huge fan of Firefly,... The Serenity name would go along a bit better with the whole theme of the space station, though. I'd bet money that what happens is Colbert wins, but they decide to stick with the theme and dignity and name it the second place name of Serenity. To recognize Colbert's contribution, they'll name the toilet on board the module after Stephen,...;-)
It's almost as if Ballmer threw these employees' chairs out the window and now he's billing them to replace the broken window! Good luck collecting this, Micro$oft!
Great! So, what we'll see is more software companies and developers installing their software into a mandatory taskbar item, just to get around this limit. Which will quickly overload most user's RAM and causing them to have ridiculously long startup times. Either that, or it will boost Google's business model of running everything through the web browser,...;-)
Microsloth might want to rethink this strategy,...
I subscribe to Verizon DSL (FiOS not available yet) and receive access to ESPN360 this way. The university I work for also subscribes to this, so I can access the site from on-campus. Content wise, I am happy with the offerings -- they have a very good selection of college football and basketball games, and quite a few NBA games as well. There's also some other, less popular (at least in the USA) sports available, like soccer and such. Technology-wise, the service keeps up and provides a good quality signal throughout the game -- not quite HD quality, but certainly watchable, and equivalent to non-HD cable broadcast.
That being said, their ISP-subscription model, while better than a customer-based subscription model (nickel-and-diming the customer for content?), still sucks. I'd much prefer the more open-access advertiser-based model that sites like Hulu and Joost are using. Then again, even those sites, in reality, are just a bigger version of this ISP-subscription model -- they're only accessible to US-based ISPs, not international. Hopefully, this will change so that people outside the US stop bitching,...
I'm pretty sure that the late CMU CS Professor, Randy Pausch, talked about doing one of these proposals in the vomit comet during this last lecture,...
This is true. Aiming the antennae and adjusting adjusting the gain works wonders at helping some stations come in better. I live in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and bought DTV converters about a year ago. At first, I only got ABC, PBS, and some shopping channels I didn't care about (why ShopNBC came crystal clear and regular NBC didn't, I have no clue?). Anyway, I eventually realized that NBC, CBS, and Fox were broadcasting from the northwestern suburbs, behind the big hill between me and the transmitters. But if I adjusted the gain to max and pointed the antennae to the northwest, they came in. CBS and Fox come in alright if I point the antennae at the Cathedral of Learning, too, so I think they might have a repeater up there?
Still, I don't use the TV for much. I get most everything off of the internet now.
I wasn't referring to Bittorrent. Ever hear of Hulu? Youtube? MTVmusic.com? Or just about any of the websites of the major television networks? I suppose I should get off your lawn, now.
After the Daily Show used their deneuralizer on us all last week, I don't know who this "George W. Bush" is that you're talking about? Is that some frat boy from Yale?
It really doesn't matter when they do it -- February, June, two years ago, two years from now. Either way, they'll still have 2 million clueless idiots cussing out at their TVs wondering what happened to their TV signal. And all of those 2 million will be technologically clueless senior citizens -- anyone under the age of, say, 40, already gets most of their TV from the internet, where it's on demand and there's far fewer commercials.
Don't blame me. Blame the stinkin' lawyers we have! If it was up to me, I'd be fine with giving the rest of the world access to hulu and other online video sites.
I'm with the Judge on this one! Even when I first started downloading music on Napster, I often wanted to get a better perspective of a particular musician or group before purchasing CDs or going to a concert. There are a lot of artists out there whose music I enjoy that I would not have if I had not downloaded their music. Much in the same way as listening to the radio -- except that, thanks to major corporations buying out all the radio stations in the country, that media is now dead. Sadly, the music industry neither has accepted this, nor have they embraced the new media (internet). Hopefully, they'll eventually realize that you can't sustain an entire industry based on income from lawsuits alone, and get with the times. If they don't get this, then I say, let 'em die!
Was just in Circuit City this afternoon for the fire sales,... and they still had tons of Monster Cable on the shelves in audio (the rest of the audio department appeared to have already been pretty well cleaned out, strangely enough). Most of the merchandise in the store is at 10% off, with games and DVDs at 20% off. Strangely enough, the cables are at 30% off, which still puts it at at least twice the "store cost",...
I was just getting ready to post the same thing myself. Geez -- you slashdotters really are dense! No wonder there's so many jokes about slashdotters not being able to find girlfriends,...;-)
I attended the same school as this chick, and 90% of my syllabuses said that works *must* be submitted in Microsoft Word format.
And how much do you want to bet that the school complains about students constantly submitting things in.docx format and not being able to read it, because, "it's not the MS Word DOCs I've seen before"?
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Ironically, I did buy a few USB printer cables from Circuit City yesterday when they had them marked down to about $3 from $30,... ;-)
I think there are several poor business decisions that the company made in the past 10 years or so that can explain why they failed. Starting with their venture into the DIVX fiasco (hint: if your "partner" in a business venture is a law firm, it's probably one to avoid). They probably could have recovered after they finally killed DIVX, if it wasn't for also deciding to get out of the major appliances business. Talk about pure stupidity there -- you see, most major appliances customers are older people, homeowners, with money, and while they're buying that refrigerator or dishwasher today, in six months, they'll probably be looking for a new wide screen television or laptop. Getting rid of appliances just eliminated a huge segment of the market, and lots of sales!
Mistake #3 was just simply not figuring out your basic store structure. After I left the company, every time I walked into the store, I swear to God, they had a new format and arrangement! I could never find anything! If you can't figure out something as simple as this, you're doomed. Going along with this, Firedog was simply at least three years too late in responding to the Geek Squad -- Best Buy won that one easily.
The final nail in the coffin (and I'm sure this has already been stated in this thread somewhere, but I'll put it here just for my own completeness) is firing all of their experienced salespeople and replacing them with non-commissioned, inexperienced, Wal-Mart-esque, clerks. I do understand that ultimately, they had to ditch the commissioned model, simply because of the change in the marketplace. But they went about it totally wrong -- a better solution would be to take advantage of the high turnover rate in retail as it is, and just not hire new commissioned salespeople, and grandfather the experienced ones, who can then be a huge resource to the newer salespeople in teaching them the ropes.
So, it's sad to see them go, but not surprising based on their business decisions of the past 10 years. I did learn a lot from working there back in the 90s, especially regarding computers, installations, and technology in general, so I thank them for that. In the meantime, I guess I'll get my electronics from Newegg or TigerDirect. At least until some new entrepreneur decides to open up a Buy More,... ;-)
I certainly would not say that, "Facebook killed TV." Grandmas to 14-year-old girls were buying computers quite a few years before Facebook even existed.
So, let's just get the effing show on the effing road, dudes,... I bought my DTV converter, with coupons, over a year ago, and still get a crappy signal because 5% of the numb-nuts put it off until the last minute,... So all the DTV stations around here only broadcast signals at 25% power. So hurry the frak up so the rest of us get a decent DTV signal!
On a more personal note, I could be happy with either Colbert or Serenity -- while I am a huge fan of Stephen Colbert, I am also a huge fan of Firefly,... The Serenity name would go along a bit better with the whole theme of the space station, though. I'd bet money that what happens is Colbert wins, but they decide to stick with the theme and dignity and name it the second place name of Serenity . To recognize Colbert's contribution, they'll name the toilet on board the module after Stephen,... ;-)
It's almost as if Ballmer threw these employees' chairs out the window and now he's billing them to replace the broken window! Good luck collecting this, Micro$oft!
Um, if you RTFA, this WAS in Russian [Soviet] space, you insensitive clod!
Microsloth might want to rethink this strategy,...
p.
That being said, their ISP-subscription model, while better than a customer-based subscription model (nickel-and-diming the customer for content?), still sucks. I'd much prefer the more open-access advertiser-based model that sites like Hulu and Joost are using. Then again, even those sites, in reality, are just a bigger version of this ISP-subscription model -- they're only accessible to US-based ISPs, not international. Hopefully, this will change so that people outside the US stop bitching,...
I'm pretty sure that the late CMU CS Professor, Randy Pausch, talked about doing one of these proposals in the vomit comet during this last lecture,...
Still, I don't use the TV for much. I get most everything off of the internet now.
I wasn't referring to Bittorrent. Ever hear of Hulu? Youtube? MTVmusic.com? Or just about any of the websites of the major television networks? I suppose I should get off your lawn, now.
After the Daily Show used their deneuralizer on us all last week, I don't know who this "George W. Bush" is that you're talking about? Is that some frat boy from Yale?
Why in the hell would anyone buy a digital converter and tune the thing to analog signals?!?! Aren't they kind of missing the whole point?!?!
It really doesn't matter when they do it -- February, June, two years ago, two years from now. Either way, they'll still have 2 million clueless idiots cussing out at their TVs wondering what happened to their TV signal. And all of those 2 million will be technologically clueless senior citizens -- anyone under the age of, say, 40, already gets most of their TV from the internet, where it's on demand and there's far fewer commercials.
At least they can reuse those clips of Morgan Freeman standing in for Barack Obama telling us we're all going to die,...
Big deal! It's still not available in every corner drugstore!
Don't blame me. Blame the stinkin' lawyers we have! If it was up to me, I'd be fine with giving the rest of the world access to hulu and other online video sites.
BSG is on Hulu.com. No need for cable or broadcast TV. Just get an HDMI or S-Video cable and connect your PC up to your television.
I'm with the Judge on this one! Even when I first started downloading music on Napster, I often wanted to get a better perspective of a particular musician or group before purchasing CDs or going to a concert. There are a lot of artists out there whose music I enjoy that I would not have if I had not downloaded their music. Much in the same way as listening to the radio -- except that, thanks to major corporations buying out all the radio stations in the country, that media is now dead. Sadly, the music industry neither has accepted this, nor have they embraced the new media (internet). Hopefully, they'll eventually realize that you can't sustain an entire industry based on income from lawsuits alone, and get with the times. If they don't get this, then I say, let 'em die!
The real question is, are all these people celebrating Obama being installed into office, or Dubya leaving? ;-)
Was just in Circuit City this afternoon for the fire sales,... and they still had tons of Monster Cable on the shelves in audio (the rest of the audio department appeared to have already been pretty well cleaned out, strangely enough). Most of the merchandise in the store is at 10% off, with games and DVDs at 20% off. Strangely enough, the cables are at 30% off, which still puts it at at least twice the "store cost",...
I was just getting ready to post the same thing myself. Geez -- you slashdotters really are dense! No wonder there's so many jokes about slashdotters not being able to find girlfriends,... ;-)
And how much do you want to bet that the school complains about students constantly submitting things in .docx format and not being able to read it, because, "it's not the MS Word DOCs I've seen before"?