Five (5) Tech Turkeys of the year?

[amirm]

List according to CNET:

http://cnettv.cnet.com/tech-turkeys-...-50115310.html

CISCO with Flip acquisition and dumping ($550 million dollar purchase!), HP with WebOS and PC announcement, Sony PS3 network hack, RIM for doing nothing for a year, and Netflix.

[flez007]

Agree on them all! ... RIM users are mad down here....

[John72953]

Why am I not surprised that CNET once again takes the opportunity to dump all over RIM. Granted they've had their setbacks and blunders, but their dislike for RIM is becoming an afront to fair reporting. Whenever you see an issue with Apple products they manage to put a positive spin on it no matter what. I used to really like CNET, but their biases are too much for me to take. Rant Over!

[Phelonious Ponk]

All good choices. Top of the list regardless of the money involved: Netflix. It's like somebody from the executive suite opened his office door one afternoon and yelled out "Hey, guys! Competition is heating up. What can we do to really alienate off our customers?"

Tim

[FrantzM]

Netflix tops the list, their decisions to raise the price then to comeup with another company makes absolutely no sense . RIM is having a perception problem in the US. RIM is very, very well seen abroad and don't seem to focus on that but that is an aside .. Cisco dumping half a bill is very puzzling .. Cisco is usually very sound in their decisions. Lately their play toward consumer brands has seem to backfire they are trying for example to unload Linksys or so I've heard ...

[rblnr]

Cisco is usually very sound in their decisions. Lately their play toward consumer brands has seem to backfire they are trying for example to unload Linksys or so I've heard .

Cisco has no idea how to market to consumers. A number of their consumer products have failed with little, if any, public awareness. How you spend what they did for Flip, then give up on it within a year is head-scratcher. What was your plan going in to the purchase?

Even the CEO can't cogently explain why Netflix was going to split into two. There was the beginnings of a great 21st century brand that was gaining power and poised to expand -- original material, etc.

Top 5 of the decade might be Kodak. A good chunk of their business was film which is a dying business obviously, but they were competitive with sensors for awhile but lost focus on that and other aspects of digital photography/cinematography. The name means nearly nothing now.

[Phelonious Ponk]

Netflix tops the list, their decisions to raise the price then to comeup with another company makes absolutely no sense .

I can make a bit of sense of it for you Frantz. Their original business model, fulfilling a subscriptions service through mail delivery of discs, is on its way out. It is slow, cumbersome and has very high operating costs compared to streaming. They want out. They want to convert their substantial customer base to streaming and dominate that model before anyone else has a chance to get a serious foothold. The path they took in their attempt to get there was so bone-headed, I'm not sure the CEO deserves to survive it. Cutting deals with the major studios to get lots of content on the streaming site would be step one. Far too much is only available on disc to expect people to change to the new delivery system. If new releases are too expensive, a premium service probably would have worked. A signing package that included a Netflix streaming device in exchange for a six month commitment might help drive people to the new model. Driving people away from your existing business model with huge price increase, assuming that many of them would just naturally go to streaming, while not even increasing the available titles enough to notice? That sounds like a great way to convert Netflix customers to Redbox customers.

Tim

[amirm]

Even the CEO can't cogently explain why Netflix was going to split into two. There was the beginnings of a great 21st century brand that was gaining power and poised to expand -- original material, etc.

Oh he knows. He just can't say it in public .

Here is the back story. Starz cable channel by "accident" got rights (including sublicensing) for Internet distribution for all the movies it shows on TV. It tried to launch its own service 5 years ago and failed miserably. So then comes Netflix, and they get a sweet license for all the movies they had. With this super low cost, and license to bunch of old movies on the cheap, Netflix launched its streaming service as a free add-on to their DVD business. Consumer responds positively for getting something for nothing and Netflix becomes the darling of the stock market.

Well, Starz gets beat up something silly over the license and chooses to not renew. All of a sudden, Netflix is facing multi-billion dollar cost for movie licensing. I think the forecast for next year $1.5B. Where to get all of that cash? Oh, why not split the company into two parts and sell one part and raise cash that way. And oh, better raise the subscription rate too as to make up for the far higher cost of license.

All logical of course. There was no free lunch for streaming content on the web. They and consumers rode it for a while but the bottom was bound to fall out and it did. That, combined with higher cost of mailing discs brought the darling of the industry into the camp of losers.

[MylesBAstor]

Oh he knows. He just can't say it in public .

Here is the back story. Starz cable channel by "accident" got rights (including sublicensing) for Internet distribution for all the movies it shows on TV. It tried to launch its own service 5 years ago and failed miserably. So then comes Netflix, and they get a sweet license for all the movies they had. With this super low cost, and license to bunch of old movies on the cheap, Netflix launched its streaming service as a free add-on to their DVD business. Consumer responds positively for getting something for nothing and Netflix becomes the darling of the stock market.

Well, Starz gets beat up something silly over the license and chooses to not renew. All of a sudden, Netflix is facing multi-billion dollar cost for movie licensing. I think the forecast for next year $1.5B. Where to get all of that cash? Oh, why not split the company into two parts and sell one part and raise cash that way. And oh, better raise the subscription rate too as to make up for the far higher cost of license.

All logical of course. There was no free lunch for streaming content on the web. They and consumers rode it for a while but the bottom was bound to fall out and it did. That, combined with higher cost of mailing discs brought the darling of the industry into the camp of losers.

Not before they destroyed Blockbuster

[Phelonious Ponk]

Oh he knows. He just can't say it in public .

Here is the back story. Starz cable channel by "accident" got rights (including sublicensing) for Internet distribution for all the movies it shows on TV. It tried to launch its own service 5 years ago and failed miserably. So then comes Netflix, and they get a sweet license for all the movies they had. With this super low cost, and license to bunch of old movies on the cheap, Netflix launched its streaming service as a free add-on to their DVD business. Consumer responds positively for getting something for nothing and Netflix becomes the darling of the stock market.

Well, Starz gets beat up something silly over the license and chooses to not renew. All of a sudden, Netflix is facing multi-billion dollar cost for movie licensing. I think the forecast for next year $1.5B. Where to get all of that cash? Oh, why not split the company into two parts and sell one part and raise cash that way. And oh, better raise the subscription rate too as to make up for the far higher cost of license.

All logical of course. There was no free lunch for streaming content on the web. They and consumers rode it for a while but the bottom was bound to fall out and it did. That, combined with higher cost of mailing discs brought the darling of the industry into the camp of losers.

I don't doubt the backstory, Emir, but I do doubt the scale of the impact. I'm a very regular Netflix streaming customer, the Starz products are clearly identified (I guess that was part of the deal), and they seem to be a pretty small % of the Netflix streaming prooduct.

Tim