I think the difference is that Netflix sees these problems and has the person-power to solve them and make themselves leaner. I guess it comes down to how far ahead you're looking really and tech companies are incentivised to look further ahead than your average big company. They're all planning for world domination (whether that actually happens or not)
I don't disagree, I'm just trying to convey that in some sense the forward-looking effort would be accelerated by looking sideways as well. Cost accounting is practiced widely in many industries and appears in medium-sized businesses (tens of employees) as well as large businesses (tens of thousands of employees).
