Recent comments by presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann have stirred up the discussion about gay marriage once again. While speaking to a group of high school…
24
Oct
2011
Jonathan Brink
The Author
Jonathan Brink
I am the Senior Editor at Provoketive. I am the author of the recently published, Discovering the God Imagination. I also serve as Senior Editor for Civitas Press, a boutique publishing firm specializing in inspiring and redemptive ideas. I am developing a new model for publishing and seek to create new opportunities for fresh and creative voices.
Occasionally, I speak on issues of justice, postmodern theology, and living a life in the way of Jesus. I leads workshops on The Practice of Love and Exploring a Postmodern Gospel at BeADisciple.com.
I am a son, a husband, and a father. I live in Folsom, Ca, with my beautiful wife and amazing three children.
Several months ago Netflix released an announcement they were dividing the company into two divisions: Netflix, which would handle the streaming division, and Qwikster, which would handle the traditional and ultimately dying business of hard DVD shipments. I remember thinking, “That is a stupid idea.” And I didn’t like the price increase that would come with such a change.
The New York Times just posted a rather ironic and telling story of the ego that often defaults companies.
Reed Hastings was soaking in a hot tub with a friend last month when he shared a secret: his company, Netflix, was about to announce a plan to divide its movie rental service into two — one offering streaming movies over the Internet, the other offering old-fashioned DVDs in the mail.
“That is awful,” the friend, who was also a Netflix subscriber, told him under a starry sky in the Bay Area, according to Mr. Hastings. “I don’t want to deal with two accounts.”
Mr. Hastings ignored the warning, believing that chief executives should generally discount what their friends say.
The rest they say is history. The press and the public crucified Netflix on every major bulletin board and turns out they left like Israel left Egypt, in mass quantities; 800,000 to be exact.
I wonder how many companies would still be around if the owner/President would have just listened to a good friend.
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I think this is a case of the company doing what would be good for it’s own internal purposes instead of what the customer wants. My husband and I have dropped down to just streaming.
When the whole split company announcement came, I saw this very funny but very appropriate comic written about the whole thing:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/netflix