Wired and Tired: The Long View on the New Netflix | Epicenter | Wired.com

Wired and Tired: The Long View on the New Netflix

Submitter wrote:

"A Wired.com article on Netflix spinning off its DVD business. It contains a number of viewpoints, all of them contradictory.

My own little injection into all of this: Back in '02, my household had to really tighten the belt, we cut the Cable and for the first time we subscribed to Netflix and it worked well for us.

However, DVDs didn't make money for Netflix when they were in transit, they made money when they were sitting on top of the TV doing nothing. The longer they sat, the better. So much better that Netflix made the conscious decision to screw their customers. What quickly became obvious to me and was later admitted to by Netflix, was that if you returned movies too quickly. Netflix would sit on your next dvd for a day or two.

While I have no doubt that real world business decision making, went into the split. No one at Netflix seemed to care how their customers felt about a 60% percent price hike, for the exact same service. Apparently no one at Netflix even thought about it. Netflix's tin-eared, tone deaf, ham-handed public relations catastrophe stems in no small part from an institutional contempt for their customers."