Netflix Killing DVDs Like Apple Killed Floppies?

cheezitmike writes "While there has been lots of outcry about Netflix separating their DVD service from their streaming service, media expert Eric Garland says they're just doing to the DVD what Apple did to the floppy disk. 'I was reminded of so many precedents: Facebook revamping its user interface, the introduction of the first Blueberry iMac, the one with the conspicuously missing 3.5-inch floppy drive on the front. All of these were moments when there was a paradigm shift that led to an immediate public outcry. People made a lot of noise and had a lot of complaints. People were very upset about these shifts...until they weren't. In the news cycle, the outcry is significant and it is problematic, but it's also important to note how quickly these things are forgotten.'"

Totally false analogy.

[Kenja]

Apple did not build their business model on providing floppy disks to people like Netflix did with DVDs. What's more, floppy disks faded into disuse due to higher capacity formats being available. With ISP data caps and poor streaming quality, DVDs are simply better for most people compared to streaming only service.

All Netflix is doing is chasing away customers. The reasons behind this can be debated, costs etc, but the end result is the same. More money for less service means fewer customers.

No

[jaymz666]

Have you seen the lines at redbox units on the weekend? Four and five people deep at out local Kroger, with two redbox vending machines.

Re:Lol 1998?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, I dunno dumbass... people who needed to SAVE stuff ? In 1998, a CD burner cost about $700, plus another $200 for the SCSI adapter. I know, I was the only guy in town with one, and business was gooooood!

Re:Apple

[localman57]

even more abysmal technology... zip drive, which off course flopped badly for its disks being so easy corruptable.

Wtf? Zip was revolutionary at the time. A typical 486 had a 200 to 400 Meg hard drive. A lot of the computers couldn't even address more space than that without a software hack to simulate LBA. A single $20 zip disk represented 1/4 to 1/1 of a typical PC hard drive. The Zip drive was the first reasonable device on which a user could easily back up their entire computer. Yeah, they had reliablity problems, but the cost per megabyte and ease with which they could be moved from PC to PC (parallel port version) was totally unmatched at the time. They sold millons of them for a reason.

I for one simply stopped using floppies in 486 era as soon as i bought my first cd recorder. never bought one floppy drive after that

Your timeline is off, or you were fabulously weathy. The 486 golden era was around 93' to 95. (the pentium 60 came out around '94). At that time, many computers shipped without CD drives of any sort. A really hot-shot machine had a 4x reader and no writer. Even around '97 a CDR (not RW) cost many hundreds of dollars, ran at 1x or 2x speeds, required a 3rd party program because there was no OS integration (and they were all horrible), and produced as many coasters as finalized disks, at nearly $1 per disk.