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."

Re:God Forbid

[huber]

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.

Sad

[Moridineas]

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.

This is bad

[Darth Maul]

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.

No more recommendations from me

[analog_line]

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.

Re:God Forbid

[MyDixieWrecked]

Yeah, I really hope that doesn't happen. Geek Squad has earned itself a laughable status lately.

I got this email this morning (I use speakeasy for my web servers). So far, speakeasy has had excellent service. Between getting 3mbit/768kbit DSL line with 8 static IPs and 8 1GB usenet accounts for 85$/month (slashdot promo), their not blocking servers, and their incredibly fast response time for problems, the service has been top notch. Completely decimated verizon's service on all levels.

I've never liked bestbuy. To me, they're like the wal*mart of electronics stores. Sure, they've got pretty much everything, but they're constantly trying to sell you things. It's not about service with them, it's about getting every penny out of your pocket that they can. They have no soul to their spin.

I really hope bestbuy's deep pockets enable speakeasy to deliver better service rather than let it stagnate or deteriorate. I guess I'll just have to play the waiting game.

Re:God Forbid

[hal2814]

Media Play went and bet of every losing horse in electronics retail. They focused on PC Gaming, video (VHS and later DVD) sales, CD sales, and books. Books sales was the only market they were in that can still make money today. While their store makeup made them something I dearly loved, they couldn't keep it up without fundamentally changing what they are. Best Buy may have killed them but they were already dying. This is a far cry from the Geek Squad that was on the rise when Best Buy purchased them.

Re:God Forbid

[Coraon]

Seeing as how evil best buy is and how worried alot of speak easy employes have got to be, I have to wonder. When are you guys leaving speak easy?

Re:God Forbid

[huber]

Agreed to an extent. If in fact books were the best money maker in the store, then why did best buy destroy that section? They cut book inventory by 75% of what it was originally. We had almost everything in stock. That Changed into "sorry we don't carry that item."

They had managers and sales associates that knew they're departments and fired them ( at least at my store ) because they refused to push customers to buy those silly replay cards and other promotions. These employees were replaced by people with far less knowledge about the products they sold and frankly didn't really care about the customer.

They changed the dress code to a far more stringent attire and just simply sucked the personality out of its employees.

Sure Media Play may have been in rough shape, but the customers that shopped there always commented on our great and friendly customer service. Best Buy took care of that mighty quick.

Re:Alternatives?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Ahhhh....

AT&T. Hope you like the Federal Logging features.

Re:God Forbid

[VirtualAdept]

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.

Re:OK, Cut the doom & gloom and focus

[russotto]

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.

I Can't Believe This...

[LionKimbro]

The SpeakEasy Cafe led me to: A great many friends, and even 4 close ones, including my girlfriend (whom I met at the FreeBSD meetings that gathered there,) ... which led to our daughter, who now turns 6. We're a happy family, and we've always felt good about paying SpeakEasy.

SpeakEasy service is out of this world. They never balk that I run Linux & FreeBSD. Whenever we've had problems, it's been our end, but their staff has been responsive and friendly. Their level-1 staff are *very* knowledgeable. Network administrators I know love to recount stories of Speakeasy awesomeness.

First the cafe burns down, and now this. :( So sad. Mike Apgar, send us an email!

If SpeakEasy service degrades in the slightest, I don't see how we can justify the extra expense. We're paying for SpeakEasy: the freedom to run Linux & FreeBSD, the freedom to occasionally host some (ahem) questionable material, the freedom to run weird configurations, their excellent service, their crazy smart staff, ...

If any of that goes away, I just don't see the point.

Community WiFi

[clubbabyseals]

Sigh. Jaded comments run rampant, but I too find my innards all in a twist.

One of Speakeasy's best policies is their encouragement to share your bandwidth via WiFi if you see fit. I do exactly that in South Philly with Speakeasy's OneLink on an extremely stable 6.0/768 with 3 statics, and provide free WiFi for anyone within reach of my externally mounted antenna. There's about 10ish regulars and who knows how many transients, so while it's not massive, chats have begun with others in the area around providing more unified coverage. I'm stoked to provide this to the area, and consider it a community utility to be spread and promoted for those with the skills and means.

Almost all other ISP's policies threaten you with hell and damnation for doing this, but Speakeasy's policy enables community through sharing. There's no easier way to bridge the last mile in the digital divide than throwing a bit of RF out your front window and carving off a bit of your bandwidth(know what you're doing), and that wouldn't be possible without the support of ISP's who Grok like Speakeasy.

I challenge the Big Box store to keep that policy alive. However, the jaded comments above weigh upon me and I suspect the eventual worst. I suspect the lawyers in Minnesota are far more an*l than Seattle. Sure they have the flannel in the closet, but for totally different reasons. And I suspect they're not as willing to let their junk hang out in the progressive wind. Happened at Netcom... first they lose the quality support crew, then they lose the shells, then they lose the women...

Signed,
Freaked out in Philly

Re:God Forbid

[dgatwood]

Well, you can always switch directly to Covad. They have decent service, IMHO. It's as simple (hah) as getting an ISP switch form and faxing it to Speakeasy for their approval. They forward it to Covad, and Covad switches you over from using Speakeasy to Covad without disconnecting your DSL at all. Or at last that's the way it's supposed to work. Didn't work when I switched from Earthlink/Covad to Covad, but then again, Earthlink was so incompetent that I wouldn't have expected anything less. :-)

Re:God Forbid

[dru]

When are you guys leaving speak easy?

And more to the point, where are you going?

Re:God Forbid

[suitepotato]

It depends on who "owns" the CPE. The partner or the CLEC. Migrations from one to the other are problematic in many many ways. As far as Covad service, well, when you have problems, I hope you enjoy talking to techs at an outsource company in India who are culturally polite to the point of seeming infuriatingly stony to Americans, and more doggedly pathologically script-driven than the California twits from @Home. You do remember, "so your modem is flashing? Have you reloaded Netscape?" don't you?

Or you can stay with Speakeasy and let their poor saps deal with that, insulating you with a more familiar brand of totally unhelpful.

Your choice. Welcome to it.