RIP Qwikster: 2011-2011
Personally, I’m encouraged by Hastings’ ability to address his customers and acknowledge that he was wrong not once, but twice. It takes real guts for a CEO, who is ostensibly smarter than the 99% and paid accordingly, to respond honestly to his critics and take the blame for steering his customers in the wrong direction.
But at the same time, I interpret his willingness to keep admitting to a perceived wrongdoing as weakness. It’s YOUR company; you have every right to make changes that you feel are right, regardless of public outcry. Don’t backtrack because a bunch of message boards blew up or because your stock dipped. Umm, hellooo? You’re Netflix! You offer a hilariously popular service better than anyone else in the world! I bet EVERY subscriber hemmed and hawed about this summer’s pricing adjustment and threatened to cancel. At the end of the day, only a fraction actually followed through. And after a few weeks with whatever Blockbuster is shilling, they’ll come crawling back.
I understood the price adjustment, because getting both streaming and rentals for 10 bucks a month really was too good to be true. I even bought their rationale for launching Qwikster and held out hope that dedicating resources to streaming would ultimately mean better content and more new releases. Instead, twitterverse and blogosphere whiners have prevailed and outed Reed Hastings as an insecure executive with no belief in his convictions.
On the plus side, there’s no chance of this assclown making a ton of money off of his Twitter handle. And that’s sort of a silver lining, I guess?
Matt Petterson is a Netflix streaming customer, currently catching up on the final season of Monk. Follow him on Twitter for episode reviews.
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