Vanity Fair has an interesting article about Netflix, Reed Hastings on Netflix's Recent Rise and Fall.
“We weren’t doing the price change to raise profits or something,” he elaborated to me. “We were doing it because we were so focused on becoming the streaming company and the global streaming company that we always wanted to be, and always have wanted to be.” He said that he sees the future of Netflix similarly to how big telephone companies see their futures in wireless, rather than in landline, phones. “Most companies that are great at something—like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores—do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business,” he wrote on the blog.
Hastings took the blame for the failure to communicate better with customers. “In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success,” he wrote. “But now I see that given the huge changes we have been recently making, I should have personally given a full justification to our members of why we are separating DVD and streaming, and charging for both. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.”
The long article is an interesting read, and concludes with the following:
During our interview, Hastings insisted on putting the whole mess into perspective. “When I look at the challenges that Gandhi had, or the various leaders through history, our challenges pale in comparison to this,” he said. “Over the last 10 years, I’ve read a ton about Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun. It’s not been the Civil War of 1862. That was dark, and how you hold things together at a time like that is completely different than what we experienced. When we had our stumble—in comparison to a health crisis—I slept well every night. I didn’t get all tense. Our issues were ones that were unfortunate business judgments, not of morality or ethics or scandal.”
