Launch day at Best Buy What fun!

I spend 5 hours last night and 12 hours today at the Best Buy by my house.  It was lots of fun. I got to train the floor staff on how to demo Vista/Office and all the upgrade options, pricing and the features of it.

This morning we handed out t-shirts, pens, wrist bands, buttons, stickers to everyone.   Then at 10AM the doors opened. We didn't have a huge crush or line waiting, but the guys in the PC department didn't get to have lunch today and spend all day helping people get PC's to their cars as fast as they could get them out of inventory.  People absolutely loved Vista and Office. I got the WOW count meter out and usually could get 4-5 out of the 10 minute demo before handing them off to a sales rep. 

My favorite customer today was the guy in his 20's. Techy looking you know the guy.  Very reserved about it. He watched my demo then bought one copy of Vista Home Premium.  He said he wanted to try it out before upgrading others.  About 2 hours later he came back. He came up to me and said that was the easiest OS upgrade he had ever done. He was blow away by Vista and was back for more. He bought two more copies of Premium and was singing as he went out the door.  People were happy, excited everywhere.

I only had one un happy customer all day.  He called Best Buy and they wanted me to talk to him. He had upgraded WITHOUT BACKING UP FIRST.  And now his Cingular wireless card wasn't working. He called Cingular and they said it would be MONTHS before they had it working on Vista. He was dead in the water. He didn't have his Windows XP disk to reinstall XP so he could get Cingular to work again.  I asked if he had run the upgrade advisor. He had and it had found "possible wireless problems". 

The moral of the story, backup FIRST.  Listen to the upgrade advisor, and contact your software partners for devices like wireless cards and make SURE they support Vista before you take the plunge.

What a fun day!