Best Buy Co., Inc.'s (NYSE: BBY) Geek Squad technical support services have been very successful for the largest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S. in recent years. It's a profit-making machine that's put the emphasis on service margins over ever-shrinking product margins. Anything and everything PC-related that you need done -- personal or business -- the Geek Squad can be there.

Technical support is the best way to describe much of what Best Buy's Geek Squad does -- so would you believe the retailer wants to get involved with technical support in a social networking sense? FixYa.com, a website that allows customers to help each other with technical issues and owner's manuals from almost any piece of technology, is generated by users -- not retailers. However, as many of us have seen, user-generated destinations can be some of the most successful. Why pay to support your customers when they can support themselves in a sense?

I don't believe this is any kind of cost-saving move by Best Buy -- the retailer simply wants to provide its customers with an additional way to receive support as fast and efficient as possible before handling in-depth issues directly to a Geek Squad representative. Best Buy's co-branded version of the site located here will allow customers an easy entry path into support and troubleshooting. Again, it looks like Best Buy is outpacing competitors in terms of getting help to its customers as fast as it can, and in this case, at no charge.

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) will be laying off about 250 technical support employees at its Nashville, Tennessee customer service location as part of a broad cost restructuring movement that was announced this past May. The job cuts will be effective immediately according to the company, with affected employees being offered sales positions, with others receiving severance packages and outplacement assistance. That's good -- it's hard to think of a technical support specialist being a good salesperson. Those two mindsets rarely co-exist in the same brain.

Dell has been busy all summer restructuring support operations to give the company a leaner cost structure. At the same time, it's revamping much of its consumer product line to better compete with rival Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ) and entering the retail market (in what I consider to be a too hurried fashion). However, that's not stopping Dell from having its boring PC boxes loaded up on pallets at your local Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) location.

Dell's 81,000 global employees will see their ranks cut by about 10% based on what the company announced in May, so there are more cuts coming. Right now, Dell officials are not saying how far along the company is in the move to lay off over 8,000 employees globally or what the numbers are for each business unit within the computer manufacturer. The Tennessee support location has grown from about 200 employees to more than 4,000 since opening in 1999, but business needs have changed quite a bit since then.