Thursday, July 26, 2007
Netflix
Sometimes you don't realize you have strong feelings about a company until later. We subscribed for several years to Netflix. It seemed like a brilliant business model, brilliantly implemented. As the pickings got thinner — fewer movies of interest — we continued almost out of habit. The few times we had an issue that couldn't be resolved on their web interface we would have to call customer service. That was something of a hunt as they make it difficult to find the number. The attitude of the customer service reps was frequently a conflation of smug-snarky.
Netflix was super fast getting us new movies on return — during the trial period. After sign-up it was okay, but not great. They didn't consider the weekend a valid mail out day. So if you sent in Friday they often weren't sending back until Tuesday, because they needed a day to process the return, which apparently arrived late Monday.
Then they started offering on demand streaming movies for Windows users. For our plan that would have meant an extra 18 hours of movies — over and above the DVDs we received. They never offered a Mac compatible version — meaning we were paying the same fee for less. Netflix justified this as being a “beta” which was first being offered only on the PC platform.
So when this article indicated that their server went down on the day their stock tanked from some real competition, finally, from Blockbuster, it wasn't a Crying Game for us.
“Netflix has a broken model,” Pachter said. “They aren't used to competition and now someone is competing against them very effectively.”