So long, Qwikster — we hardly knew you!
Only a few short weeks ago, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced his latest and greatest idea: to split Netflix into 2 separate companies, keep Netflix as a streaming business and invent Qwikster as a totally unrelated DVD by mail business, then make existing customers create 2 separate accounts on 2 separate websites and charge $7.99 for each service (a total of $15.98), instead of the $9.99 everyone had been paying. Great idea, right? WRONG!!!
Since that brilliant announcement, Netflix stock has plummeted, customers have been closing their accounts in the droves and Netflix has been mired in an unbelievable PR embarrassment. Now, Hastings has decided to kill off Qwikster before the DVD-only service could even launch.
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| Reed Hastings |
In a blog posting earlier this week, Hastings revealed to the world that he has decided to pull the plug on Qwikster, saying the confusion from having a separate, DVD-only company would be too great. Qwikster and Netflix would have operated independent of each other and on 2 separate websites, requiring users to pay 2 different companies each month, while maintaining 2 separate profiles and having to post movie reviews twice. Well, customers weren’t having it and Hastings was forced to eat a healthy helping of humble pie (again)!
“It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs,” Hastings wrote. “This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, no Qwikster.”
Following Hastings’ blog post, customers wasted no time taking pot shots at the CEO and his destructive ways of ruining a perfectly good thing and running a profitable company into the ground. “Splitting Netflix in two so that you have Netflix and Qwikster is the worst business decision since New Coke,” wrote 1 of the 27,000 disgruntled customers who commented on Hastings’ blog post.
When Hastings first unveiled Qwikster less than a month ago, he took to YouTube to try and explain to a very angry customer base that the unique challenges required to market and provide DVD rentals made it necessary to operate this service as its own business:
“We realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.
But reaction to Hastings and his bright idea was about 99.999% negative, with many commenters suggesting it was time for Hastings to step down as CEO. Said one user: “Reed you don’t know what you’re doing, do you? Please offer me a job, I’ve got a few easy steps to save the company.”
