If you remember best buy/circuit city/target etc. in the late 90s/2000s wanted to middle man everything, and retail brand everything.

What changed?

How has best buy not leveraged their geek squad acquisition in 2002 to sell retail FOSS systems, and use their IT as a red hat like direct to consumer model?

>>106153797 (OP)
Consumers care about brands and best buy doesn't have the strength to compete with international corporations to build massive brands. FOSS tends to spread more through word of mouth.

>>106153797 (OP)
the execs are luddites who can't imagine being able to do a single round of advertising in order to promote what would effectively be their own brand but without having to pay for q&a or product development. They're too scared of not having total control of every step of the process.

>>106153797 (OP)
The only thing these retailers care about these days is watching customers around the store. Retailers have had too many losses (theft, shortage, overstock, tariffs and inflation) in recent years to invest in any strategic moves to improve their business model.

FOSS is not a recognized in any matter to the average consumer and won't sell due to compatibility issues with other hardware.

>>106156151
>FOSS is not a recognized in any matter to the average consumer and won't sell due to compatibility issues with other hardware.

Perhaps however with in house IT they could make their own distro and app store. It just seems like small retail PC organizations would jump on that to some degree and haven't

>>106153797 (OP)
I remember buying a boxed copy of Red Hat at BestBuy. I didn't have the internet at the time.

There are no deals or cheap products at Best Buy stores anymore. You can only get them online. Just a matter of time before Best Buy stores close down for good.

>selling linux desktops to normies
yeah, that's a sound business model, op!

>>106157813
The only thing keeping their model alive is the Price Match Guarantee.

>>106160136
Not linux desktops (or laptops)
Linux.
OP wants to sell them Linux, why isn't BestBuy selling Ubuntu for $99 a pop?
>bbbut you can download it free
Normies don't know that and selling it in a store 'legitimizes' it to normies.

You guys are just too young to remember when retailers did this. They stopped when everyone moved from dial up to adsl

>>106160309
>Normies don't know that and selling it in a store 'legitimizes' it to normies.
sure go ahead and see if there's any demand of linux installs on the market

Was anyone else poor and just reading catalogs like this for fun, never getting anything

>>106160136

Worked for Google and apple

>>106161905

>>106153797 (OP)
I use to work for Best Buy. Geek Squad wasn't about actually helping people with computers. It was another sell avenue to sell software, mostly anti virus software, back up tools, and over charge customers for basic, and I mean, absolute basic repairs. Repairs like they cannot find "the internet icon on their desktop." Any, actual repair is sent off site to have near slave labor actually fix it (if we couldn't send it back to the OEM under warranty).

>>106163880
That said, for a short awhile, there were a few select Best Buy locations who actually did try to have their Geek Squad be an actual, repair, "IT" style help center, but that really didn't last long.
There might be a Best Buy still out there that does in house actual computer repair and "IT" level of help, but it would be like finding a unicorn. As far as I am aware, they all turned over to simply selling over priced software, over charging for really dumb shit, and sending everything off to the OEM under warranty or to off site, slave labor prices, repairs.

The only actual hands on thing Geek Squad still does is in home installation for televisions and speaker systems, trying to up sell customers to really overpriced cables.

>>106163933
If you actually want to do something hands on, at Best Buy, they still have car radio and speaker system installation on site. If you can get hired for that position, it would actually be a dream job for people who just want to install shit because that is the only position Best Buy actually still has that's truly hands on with very minor up selling. It really is 90% hands on, physical installation.

Silly zoomers don't know about retail SuSE, Yggdrasil and Slackware.

Slackware 1.1 even came on 55 floppy discs lel

Reminder
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI