Here's how this Netflix thing is going to shake out.  Hastings is going to split the two products in two so that it's easier for a tech/media company to but the streaming business.  The DVD business remains a cash cow that they can ride out until the last dollar shows up.  This all creates a milestone that allows him to mentally walk away in 2-4 years and change education (his stated post-Netflix gig).  Pretty simple.  The brand's new public perception is just accelerating that plan.  The stock price is now back to where it should have been in the first place.  If there's anything I would fault Hastings on it is not selling the company when he knew the company was over priced.  Hindsight.

What I find most interesting in this whole story is how many people have the energy to get worked up over spending $10 per month for an entertainment service.  If it's not working for you -- cancel it.  Yes, the $10 plan used to include streaming and one disc.  You used to get a steal.  Now you just get a bargain.

Bottom Line: If a customer is so price sensitive that you can't extract an additional $5 - $7 per month out of them -- make them leave.  You probably didn't want them in the first place.

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Someone asked me why I hadn't hired any MBAs.  Funny.  After realizing they were serious, I replied with this...

Half of MBAs are worthless.  My problem is that half the time I can't tell which half.

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Solid comment on the Ev / Twitter meme...

It's scary how people these days are so demotivated by other people's success, almost demoralized by the fact that they just can't hustle hard enough, that their ideas are never good enough, that no matter what they do they can't seem to make it big and it's all enough to make them resort to trying, and I stress on the word 'trying', to deflate others around them. It's human instinct to lash out at what doesn't make you happy and while a lot of it is due to the bitterness, you have to realize that it's all just news. News, they want to sell their sites, their articles, get people reading, if there's no conspiracy to write about then they'll fabricate one out of nothing more than the idea that a creative guy such as Ev with nothing but passion and drive could really be an evil genius asshole.

I've never worked with Ev but have used products spewed out from the pit of his creative mind itself and in turn have made enough from them to realize I can only be grateful that creative individuals like Evan still maintain a passion for what they do, and keep producing awesome products.

To the lungfish of damnation writing BS about others that are constantly shaping our web and the way we interact, screw you.

http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2011/04/evs-assholishness-is-greatly-exaggerat...

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It's easy to show disgust for the obvious bad guy.  The lines are clear and there's little risk that you'll receive flack for voicing your opinion (or voting with your wallet).  The Parsons story is one of these situations.  Killing a free, intelligent and potentially endangered elephant for sport?  Yeah, pretty easy to call that.  What's harder to take a stand against are the gray areas.  Is killing a bred-to-eat cow or pig is okay?  Seems to me that there is some sort of spectrum for these things and killing that elephant is worse than killing a farmed cow.  But the cow still ends up dead.  The reaction from some may be, "People need to eat and it's okay to farm livestock if they are raised/slaughtered in a humane fashion."  That's seems like reasonable logic to me.  However, some percentage of the livestock sold in America isn't raised/slaughtered in a humane fashion.  I'll let others argue over what that actual percentage might be.  The point is that while there are large livestock companies to villainize there is no Bob Parsons-type individual to be singled out in that scenario.  This makes it harder to measure who, when and were the line is being crossed.  In addition, buying meat with more guarantees comes at a price point that many can't stomach.  Nevertheless, the numbers are staggering.

An estimated 95,000 cows were killed in the US today.  According to this article there are over 150 million cattle, bison, sheep, hogs, and goats killed in the US each year.  Almost 9 billion chickens, turkeys, and ducks.  I still eat fish, so I can't point fingers.  I just wish more people would get worked up over the systemic antagonist the way we do with the obvious bad guy.

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Great exchange to on Engadget...

Kyler Bolden says, "Why would you need a quad core cell phone?"

Jonny_O replies, "Why would you need more than 640K of RAM in a PC?"

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To those who wax nostalgic about how great music used to be:

1. Keep listening to those old songs.  No one is stopping you.
2. Don't expect people to write new songs about a world they don't live in (i.e. the past).

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You're looking real desperate right now.  This is some of the most blantant haterade I've ever seen in the tech space.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/09/verifone-calls-out-square-for-gaping-secur...

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It looks like FireFTP switches from "Automatic Mode" to "ASCII Mode" after installing the latest Firefox update (v3.6.15).  Check for this if you're uploading images or other binary files and they're not rendering on the web server.  The error you may see in the browsers is, "The image cannot be displayed, because it contains errors."  The fix is just to switch back to auto in the settings (FireFTP > Tools > Downloads/Uploads).

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"I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra)." -- Fred Wilson

Great post.  The real point of the article is that marketing is critical, but you shouldn't be paying someone else to do it.  Thanks for the link Jamey.

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/marketing.html

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SlideShare may have just found a business model.

http://www.slideshare.net/zipcast

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I'm looking for a mic for screencasts.  I don't think the list price is supposed to be the same as the sale price.  Where's the automated rule in their e-commerce engine that stops that from happening?

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FTA...

Calacanis says YouTube can currently generate about $2 to $4 per 1,000 views, depending on the video. So a video that costs $500 to produce would need to be viewed about 160,000 times to break even at a $3 per 1,000 views revenue rate. Not unreasonable over a several years for highly searched terms.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mahalo-4-2011-1

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Running a service is hard.  One of the reasons I like building native mobile apps that integrate with existing cloud services is because I'm not on the hook to run operations.  We're exploring a SaaS offering for marketers at OnePlane.  The part we're stuck on is the ops piece -- not building the app.  That really is the hard part.  Tumblr went down last month.  That situation was interesting since they just recently started taking money.  Now there is a different expectation with their customers.  Bottom Line: Be ready before you sign up customers and take their money for your shiny new software service.  They'll expect it.

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