re: Best Buy shares dive on news of Amazon Geek Squad competitor

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While I do mostly agree with you, in my experience at Geek Squad years ago, there were plenty of dumb people my age and younger that still needed Geek Squad's help for ridiculously simple shite. Their clientele is not all grandmas and grandpas.

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Yeah, part of the reason I'm not 100% on it is because I know some of these people, too. I think in general, though, people are becoming more savvy, not less. So I don't think Geek Squad services as far as teaching people will become "more and more important" as the poster I replied to said.

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This is true, but the more they dumb down the end user interface, the less aware people are of how the underlying software and hardware works. When something goes wrong, they have no idea where to begin to fix it, whereas in years past the average user had more awareness of how things worked and thus how to fix them.

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This is a good point, and the percentage of users who understand the inner workings will probably stay pretty much the same. I just think the long tail of users who can just use the devices will get longer without much paid instruction.

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Granted, increasingly, "fixing" tends to mean "throw it in the garbage and buy another one."

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Yep, if a reboot doesn't fix it, it's usually time for a new one. The economics of technology pretty much dictate that the effort spent repairing things will continue to dwindle.



Usually I would think that, if Amazon or Google or Apple plans to enter a market that I don't see much future in, then I must be wrong. In this case, though, I don't think Amazon expects to make a lot of money on the service. Rather, the in-home installation and training service is intended to boost retail sales. It's a support system to help people get into home automation, and of course get them to use Alexa.

As the industry matures, I think these services will be less necessary, too. I remember when building a computer meant you had to set jumpers and dip switches and IRQs. Now it's all plug and play. These ecosystems of devices will take the same course, and more and more of the setup process and complexity will be hidden and handled automatically.