Losing Stephen Gillett in December, after only nine months on the job, was a huge blow for at least two reasons. First the analysts loved him; even some of Best Buy’s harshest critics saw hope for the firm as long as Gillett was in the picture. Without him, a financial blogger wrote, Best Buy’s stock was “worse than strong sell; you should take the name off of your radar. Don’t touch it with your worst enemy’s ten-foot pole and especially his or her trading platform… Best Buy will fail as a retail company whereas it could have and should have given itself a fighting chance by morphing into a tech company like Starbucks. Second, the employees believed in him and his vision for intergrating the digital and physical retail worlds, and had finally started to have hope for Best Buy’s future again. Gillett’s nickname around the company was Neo, after the hero in the movie The Matrix.
Scott Durchslag was perhaps equally as talented, but he had some big shoes to fill as the newly named head of Best Buy’s global e-commerce division.