I first met Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings in 2001 at a Maxtor event where I was the dinner speaker. He explained then that the company had always intended to deliver movies over the Internet (hence the name Netflix) but was starting with DVDs because the network infrastructure simply wasn’t ready for digital delivery. They’d eventually drop the DVD deliveries, though I think his estimate of when that would happen was around 2007, not 2011 as the company announced this week. That wasn’t his only underestimation, of course. Hastings also underestimated consumer and Wall Street reaction to the boneheaded way Netflix handled a recent pricing change.
Day traders have to love this, but unless you have your […]
Note — I have written previously about other aspects of this subject 
Moving sucks. Our furniture arrived late last week so I’ve been off the clock for awhile and there is a lot of catching-up to do. We’ll start with Microsoft and Windows 8, which I’ll argue are going to be formidable competitors in the tablet space, primarily because it’s that or start spending all that cash on diversified investments to turn Microsoft into a Berkshire Hathaway. This is probably Ballmer’s last stand as a high tech CEO.
This is my promised follow-up to How Not to Run Yahoo, so I suppose this should have been titled How to Run Yahoo, but I’m too much of a smart-ass for that. I spoke to a bunch of smart people (past and present Yahoos) some of whom even allowed me to print their names, and here’s our consensus view on what the next Yahoo CEO really has to do to turn the company around. I’m sorry it all sounds so negative, but it is toward a positive end, remember.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, here is my column originally published September 13, 2001.