People are upset about the Netflix change because they don’t care about the business, they care about the product. Even if the disc business is good now, it’s not great — it’s sliding, it’s becoming much more expensive, and it faces a lot of risks relying on the postal service as it is today (which is bound to change drastically soon).
Customers don’t care about this stuff because it works great now. But just because something is fantastic for you, the consumer, doesn’t mean it is tenable or sustainable in the future: the $99 TouchPad liquidation spawned a lot of conversations about how maybe HP should have found a way to sell them at a loss earlier, forgetting that price was set because they’re being liquidated and discontinued.
The disconnect is that while the better business is streaming, the better product — the catalog of movies — are discs. And the disc business appears to be getting treated like yesterday’s chicken.
