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Best Buy now Gold Certified Partner
Posted: 9:37 am March 14th, 2006	Post a comment IT Business, Microsoft

Best Buy is now a Gold Certified Partner in addition to being trained by Harry Brelsfords books. There has been relatively little interest in this by IT consultants but having dealt with Microsoft Partners for over a decade I can tell you I'm not surprised by the lack of concern. There is always the "we're better" attitude in the low-end consulting world.. you used to know these as your local system builders, Y2K experts, webmasters, web hosting companies and support engineers. Todays flavor is "Managed Service Providers" but inevidably only the best will survive. Many shots have been taken at Best Buy and their incompetence, but if they all read all of Harry's books they will be at least as good if not better than half the partners I see out there. Make no mistake, job and wage losses due to open markets and globalization are nothing compared to what Best Buy & Microsoft can do to diminish the need for the small business consultant. But hey, its another day and probably not a big deal to you. As the famous story goes "nothing of significance happened today"…

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8 Comments

Anonymous | March 14th, 2006 at 12:19 pm

Eh, if you can’t fight it, why bother worrying about it?

Anonymous | March 14th, 2006 at 2:40 pm

2 words why i don’t care: Geek Squad

around here at least, they have a reputation of being ridiculously incompetant.

I had a GS’er sent over by Best Buy tell an employee of one of my clients that I made her office network so secure, that her home PC needed to be rebuilt before she could log in with terminal services. I’m still scratching my head on that one. Anyway, I replaced the shortcut to RDP on her desktop, and all was well.

I sincerely doubt my clients are ready to let the kids at the big box store manage their networks

Anonymous | March 14th, 2006 at 3:47 pm

You always get what you pay for!!

happyfunboy | March 14th, 2006 at 6:59 pm

you already know my answer to this…

Anonymous | March 15th, 2006 at 5:25 am

Vlad,

This series of posts has been extremely high quality.

My respect for you as a business person and some with the foresight to see the future has risen to a new level.

I have for years been looking at the needs of Small Businesses and this trend, although in its infancy will have a significant imapct.

Although many see the weekness in Best Buy and Geek Squad, they see this as permanent problems and not fixable problems. They also don’t see that IBM was not the only company to make computers, they were just the first. Best Buy will have competion and eventually those player will be the major stake holders in delivering to the market.

This is not a time to be sticking your head in the sand.

Jeff Loucks

Andrea Brice | March 15th, 2006 at 5:26 am

Big time threat… I do not see them having great staff retention rate at the salaries they have offered. I mean, imagine the kids they get for $12 an hour? Those would get swallowed up by any business with over 10 employees in a heartbeat if they were any good.

Anonymous | March 15th, 2006 at 5:15 pm

I think you’ll be suprised at just what kind of competition Best Buy represents. I just did a post, on this subject, and think that the SMB IT consulting market needs to consider this new competition.

http://addicted-to-it.blogspot.com/2006/03/business-best-buy-and-smb-consulting.html

Anonymous | March 19th, 2006 at 10:13 pm

I agree with Jeff Loucks, their will be new competition. Today I saw a Sunday Flyer with a PT crusier painted with the staples “geek squad” : http://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/marketing/mobiletech/?storeId=10001&cm_ven=Glamour&cm_ite=mobiletech

Yes competion is on it’s way. So hang on to the higher hanging fruit.

SBS Rocks!!!

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