Thanks for posting, feels to me like the core concept was good but that they failed to fully market test the products. Feels like they could have avoided many of the duds by taking a leaf from Kickstarter's book and booking pre-order revenue prior to actual production. I wonder why they didn't try that?
tl;dr
An online community for inventors to brainstorm and pitch ideas they have. The entire community helps refine the idea (name, marketing slogan, features) - and then Quirky picks a few at a time to bring to market (manufacturing, distribution).
Go back and watch their weekly review sessions. They were all publically streamed and had inventors pitching ideas to a panel of Quirky folks like their CEO.
As Reed says, the streaming business is global, but the DVD business is US-only. Maintaining code that services functions that apply in some locales but not others will slow down Netflix's ability to innovate.
Again, Apple runs businesses (eg. Macs) that operate in some jurisdictions that their other businesses (eg. iTunes) do not. You don't need a structural separation to 'innovate', you need a structural separation to ease a sale of a business.
I honestly don't care how Apple runs it's business. I don't work for apple, I do, on the other hand, work for netflix, and not having to worry about DVDs will be a nice relief.
^^ This is why Netflix is fubar'd. Totally internally looking -- not giving a shit what it means for their customers.
Yeah, we all love paying two bills each month, having to search for content two places, having our ratings queues forked and kept out of sync. Thanks, we're all so glad to hear that it's easier for you.
We'll make it even easier: find new customers. We're gone.
I would be interested in what you find as a good replacement because I might consider a switch if it were good enough. I just killed my cable and that was costing me ~$70/ month.
I might agree with you if Netflix ran their DVD business in a few other countries. That is not the case however. The DVD business is still profitable. Reed said it's unlikely he'll sell it for a long time.
The dvd-streaming divide difficulty is nothing compared to the difficulty around licensing content for different territories, as the studios are just a nightmare.
Just out of curiosity, why would maintaining two accounts be so painful? If that were so, wouldn't it be equally painful to maintain different social network accounts (assuming you have two or more).
Netflix is the one recurring bill on my credit card. I like the company and think it has great customer service. I trust the company. I don't want multiple recurring charges on my credit card. The more paid accounts a person has the more likely it is that an account will be forgotten about.
Also, it would be a pain to find out a movie isn't available for streaming and then having to login to another account to put the movie in its cue. And I don't want to browse DVDs and put one in my queue when it's available for streaming.
But its not a new company. Its the same organization headed by the same person with the same employees as before. There is just some different branding.
The new branding includes a CEO and it's being billed separately. Not to mention being completely separated online (no shared ratings or searching). It's a different company.
Billing will be separate, which is a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
The bigger issue is splitting my ratings and thus my suggestions. I already ignore other places to rate movies since only netflix provided a tangible benefit to me. Split it, and it won't.
With billing, most of us already maintain different accounts with different e-commerce sites. One more is not that bad. Ratings on either Qwikster or Netflix will benefit you because of the improved recommendations. Yes, it's a shame they won't be integrated, but overall the split will benefit the company and its customers.
Everyone on this thread knows that there is no technical reason to split the ratings. It's implausible that a company of this size couldn't break that subsystem into a shared service.
The reason for the split has to be business-related, and my best bet is to create a very clean separation of intellectual property. This among other things is why I find the post disingenuous.
Yeah, to me this looks like a way to isolate the profit-making but old-school DVD business from the disruptive but fragile streaming platform. Studios are squeezing streaming providers for royalties at the moment, and sooner or later either the small players will fold, or streaming will fully replace dvds; by splitting services, Reed is trying to maximize its chances of maintaining at least one solid business.
Still, the right thing to do would be to maintain technical integration between the two, maybe spinning off the analytics / suggestions as a third company providing services to both for a nominal fee.
Not true. You can opt for family coverage but there are more out-of-pocket costs for the employee. I don't know how this compares with other companies though.
I work at Netflix and I cannot say that my experience reflects this particular review. I like working here because my coworkers are intelligent and I get to work on exciting projects. The slides we have on the jobs page are fairly accurate.
That said, I can't completely discount other people's experience since I only have my own experience to go on. It would seem that folks are let go because their skills are no longer relevant or they don't perform to par. This does not necessarily indicate that the person is a poor employee, but that he/she was not able to deliver given a particular context.
Neil Gaiman also took a lot of flack when it was revealed how much he charged for speaking engagements. But when he explained his reasoning, I came to see how his high fee rate was justified.
Similarly, if Mike is entertaining a lot of contracting requests, a surefire way to filter out the wheat from the chaff is to set a high contracting fee rate.
I have no direct knowledge of how we use that survey, but I suspect that an outlier such as yourself would not affect the results of the survey. If there is a wide-spread drop in quality, I think the survey would pick that up. It's hard to design the perfect survey though, but I'll see if the powers-that-be can improve the survey.
BTW one of the nice things about netflix is how well it treats its outliers :-) For example for ages I patiently filled in the "when did your DVD get to you" survey not expecting anything better being out in the boondocks (Hawaii) and them to my astonishment, Netflix opened a shipping depot in Honolulu.
And then there was the "multiple queues" incident where the company agreed to keep the feature even though only a relative small percentage of subscribers really used it.
