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This little number is news from the end of last week, so I don’t claim to be late breaking here but I thought it was worth comment. I have long disliked Best Buy’s Geek Squad service for a number of different reasons. To see them actually caught using expensive software illegally, on video camera no less, is just so sweet.

First of all, many of you know I’m in the computer customer service business, just like Geek Squad. At the Help Desk we provide free software repair help to the University community including faculty, students, and staff. I might be a little biased having been the technical lead and even quasi-manager of our student support group for almost a year, but I think we do a pretty good job at what we do. We have customer surveys praising our speedy service and excellent operation of their equipment after we have returned it back to them. We have people come to us all the time with computers that they “just had fixed at Best Buy.”

From my experience Best Buy, and the Geek Squad in particular, sells unnecessary software to customers who don’t know exactly what they need. They may reformat a machine but when they are done they load it with so many pieces of extraneous software that the operation of the computer won’t be nearly as good as newly reformatted computer should be. I’ve been to the Geek Squad desk with family before as they drop their machine off for service. The high pressure sales tactics used would be enough to terrify almost any normal customer into purchasing any number of “security software” pieces. Add that together with their lacklust attempts at re-installing hardware drivers post-reformat, they perform pretty pathetically at their job.

So today I read that they are being sued by well known software company Winternals because they have illegally been using their software, the Administrator’s Pak in particular. Curious, I visited Winternals’s site and researched what one license for one administrator costs: it was near $1,200!! Then I read in some of the PDF scans of the actual filed legal documents that the value of the licensing that Winternals was going to sell to Best Buy during their negotiations was in the several million dollar range. Keep in mind that Geek Squad now has approximately 12,000 employees, so this license would be for approximately that many users. Best Buy suddenly backed out of negotiations for licensing. Rather odd since they had been saying for months that they were interested in this.

Winternals has since talked with several Geek Squad former employees who told them that they used Administrator’s Pak in their day-to-day duties anyway. Winternals called Geek Squad and ran several test cases where Geek Squad came to their “house” to perform data recovery. The sessions were taped an in several of the videos it is clearly obvious that the Geek Squad employee is using Winternals Software (this is all according to the officially filed legal documents on Winternals Site).

Suffice it to say that I’ve never been a big fan of the Geek Squad service and now seeing them in the hot seat so they can sweat it out a little bit makes me a happy man.

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