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Media The Internet

Netflix Killing DVDs Like Apple Killed Floppies? 345

Posted by Soulskill from the steve-did-it-in-the-library-with-one-button dept.
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.'"
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Netflix Killing DVDs Like Apple Killed Floppies? More

Netflix Killing DVDs Like Apple Killed Floppies?

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  • Apple (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What did apple do to floppies?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by larry bagina ( 561269 )
      You don't remember? They went around, door to door, and stole the floppy drive from every macintosh ever created. You had a Mac with a built-in floppy drive? Too bad asshole, now you need to shell out for an external floppy drive.

      Or maybe they introduced a new line of computers without a floppy drive and the comparison doesn't apply.

      • Re:Apple (Score:4, Funny)

        by Canazza ( 1428553 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:07PM (#36849868)

        Everyone knows AOL killed the floppy disk when they gave everyone a CD ROM with the whole Internet on it.

        • Re:Apple (Score:4, Interesting)

          by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:17PM (#36850032) Homepage Journal
          LOL....but getting back on topic...

          I don't get it...I'm surprised I see as many people as I do opting for streaming over the disks from Netflix with this price rise. Is this mainly people that do not have a nice HD tv to watch on.....?

          I mean, I've been with netflix since 2000. I've always been on the 3 out at a time...and upgraded to bluray.

          The streaming, was a nice add on...for free.

          However, I pretty much only used streaming (when I could find something good in the very limited selection) for older shows or movies that weren't very high quality source material.

          But for newer movies or shows...I'm always opting for bluray rental. I mean, I didn't shell out over $2K for a 59" plasma HD tv (and I have a sound system to back up the great image) to just watch substandard source material on. I mean, streaming can't match the quality video/audio that I get on a bluray disk.

          *sigh*....are there really that few people today that care about quality audio and video? I guess. Then again, I"m one of those that has refused to buy music online until it comes in a lossless format with no DRM. I buy CD's....and rip them myself to lossy formats for portable players in lesser listening environments (gym, car)...but I'd rather have the best source I can get for my living room where I have spent years since my childhood building a quality audio/video system. I'm not talking about the crazy audiophile stuff you hear about (frozen cables for $1K/ft, etc)...but solid equipment.

          Ok...enough said...I ramble...but if you do ignore the audio aspect of it...most of the good HD tv's coming out today DO present an awesome picture, so, just wondering...why so many people settle for streaming when they spent so much $$ on a quality HDTV?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by 0123456 ( 636235 )

            Ok...enough said...I ramble...but if you do ignore the audio aspect of it...most of the good HD tv's coming out today DO present an awesome picture, so, just wondering...why so many people settle for streaming when they spent so much $$ on a quality HDTV?

            People used to buy 50-inch SDTVs and watch VHS tapes on them.

          • Re:Apple (Score:4, Interesting)

            by RoverDaddy ( 869116 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:36PM (#36850360) Homepage

            I didn't shell out over $2K for a 59" plasma HD tv (and I have a sound system to back up the great image) to just watch substandard source material on.

            Well there you go. I -didn't' shell out $2K for a 59" plasma HD tv. My TV is 32" LCD, only 780p. No sound system, just the TV speakers.

            The big win for streaming for me and my kids is that I get to decide what I want to watch -right now-, not two days from now when I can get turnaround of my latest DVD from Netflix. Yes, it's mostly back catalog, but so what: it's not like I've already seen every movie ever made. There are dozens of flicks from the past 5 years I still haven't seen. And my daughter is gobbling up the tween-age series available like she's never had TV before.

            I'll be dropping the DVD subscription when the price goes up. For the occasional desire to see a recent release, I'll go Redbox.

            • The big win for streaming for me and my kids is that I get to decide what I want to watch -right now-, not two days from now when I can get turnaround of my latest DVD from Netflix.

              A million times, this. I used to cycle out the one DVD at a time thing... but like others, it tends to sit around forever until I watch it. I know my friends and family have this problem too.

              In the meantime, I'm cruising through 20 discs worth of TV shows I like and various movies I wouldn't want to gamble on getting in the mail. Streaming from a large catalog of content suits both my indecisiveness and sense of immediacy, just right. And the picture is quite good, if even as a trade-off for unmatch

          • Re:Apple (Score:4)

            by eln ( 21727 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:41PM (#36850414)
            I have a 1080p TV. I use Netflix streaming all the time, and I've had the same Netflix DVD out for about 6 months now. I switched my plan to the streaming only plan just recently, and as soon as I find where I put that DVD, I'll mail it back in.

            It's really a matter of convenience and immediacy. With streaming, I can choose from a pretty good selection of movies and TV shows as soon as I decide I want to watch one. I don't have to try to predict what I'll be in the mood to watch 3 days from now, and I don't have to sift through the smoldering ruins of a video store or deal with the tiny selection of a Redbox.

            Yes, the streaming quality is worse than, say, blu ray, but it's still perfectly adequate for most movies. Hell, I grew up on VHS, and the streaming is much better than that.

            So why do I have the HDTV at all? Because certain movies really benefit from it, and those movies I'll usually rent on DVD or blu ray from a Redbox (or the locally-owned kiosk that has better movies, probably because they buy the "not for rental" copies of movies and rent them out anyway), or buy them on blu ray. Also, televised sports are better on HD (although they're not full 1080p of course).

    • I'm not sure, but I think it involved Vaseline, peanut brittle, and a keg.

    • it is quite simple. their brilliant move away from floppies was like this
      - apple stopped deploying floppy drive with G3 and replaced it with another even more abysmal technology... zip drive, which off course flopped badly for its disks being so easy corruptable.
      - G4 stopped zip nonsense, leaving users complaining how there was no external device where they could save data to. floppy removed, no more scsi, cd-rom by default and lack of any usb external device. you couldn't believe how many usb floppies were

      • Re:Apple (Score:5, Informative)

        by localman57 ( 1340533 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:40PM (#36850398)

        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.

  • ha (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld@ g m a i l . com> on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:01PM (#36849760) Homepage
    Apple has never been relevant enough on the desktop to kill any desktop technology. PC CD-Rs and then the internet killed floppy drives.

    • Re:ha (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stormthirst ( 66538 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:04PM (#36849802)

      That and cheap USB keys which were faster, considerably more reliable and many times the capacity.

      • Re:ha (Score:5, Insightful)

        by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:46PM (#36850482)

        Both of which took a couple years to become affordable after Apple prematurely killed floppies.

        I was still using floppies long after Apple "killed" them. And when a worthy replacement came along... I switched.

    • Don't forget USB thumb drives. It just so happens that around the same time Apple started killing floppies in their machines, generic plug and play USB thumb drives started to come available for PCs.

      • I didn't think thumb drives came until later. I thought it was RW CDs/DVDs that brought the end of the floppy, though, they were not nearly as simple to use as floppy disks, hence the need for thumb drives.

        • Oh they did come later than CDRs, but nothing truly replace the functionality of the floppy until thumb drives. USB drives were small and portable, robust, rewritable, sharable, and as of Windows 2000/ME could be plugged into almost any computer. Still they were more expensive than the floppy, but of course that changed rapidly.

      • I think that USB storage standards are what did it. Before that, the only reliable thing you could bring between machines was Floppy and CD-R. CD-R was annoy if you just wanted a single file, and you couldn't just work off them (open file, edit, save), like you could with a floppy. so they didn't kill floppies either. What killed floppies was the fact that there was drivers on every machine that let you plug in your USB storage device into any computer and have it just work. If IOMega could have got MS

    • Wait! Floppies are dead? But...but...that means I am working in a graveyard! I am pretty sure that should be illegal.

      Seriously though, floppies still have their use. A quick reliable way to boot an old machine up and run small utilities? Pass the 'dead' disk please!

    • Re:ha (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:12PM (#36849954)
      somehow they were relevant enough to push and make popular by being early adopters, even of tech they didn't invent and even of things others sold but didn't make wildly popular. USB, Firewire, SCSI, gui with mouse, touch smartphones,

    • E-mail killed floppies (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rwade ( 131726 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:14PM (#36849976)

      I would say that the wide-adoption of corporate/small-business e-mail systems in the mid-late 90s killed the floppy disk. Up until then, legal assistants, secretaries, financial analysts, and other workers on the lower-rungs would truck a floppy disk from desk to desk to collaborate with colleagues, present work to the boss, or deliver documents to clients. With e-mail, the small files that could go on floppy disks could more easily be sent more easily with even the slower LAN and shared-internet connections.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 )

      They might not have killed anything, but they sure as hell popularized it. How many USB peripherials did you see before the iMac came out? USB was around at the time - I have a Gateway P100 with USB ports on it from the late 90's. Couldn't find anything to plug into them until the iMac came out - then nearly all the available peripherals were in some garish color, or translucent, to match the iMac.

      • The iMac came out in 1998.... the same year as a little known operating system that found its way on to 90% of computers and also happened to include native USB support.

      • Nope, I had a Diamond RIO Mp3 player (huge full size HD w/ an LCD Screen), keyboards, mice, cameras, etc. Apple's baby was Firewire, not USB. Apple had Zip to do with the passing of floppies.

        It was the increase in the RAM in computers which resulted in much larger programs being written. Since high speed network connectivity didn't really exist, there had to be a different medium to install all these huge programs; 30 disks just wasn't going to cut it. So, the next logical choice at the time was either

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dave420 ( 699308 )
        *cough* Windows 98 SE *cough*

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by eln ( 21727 )
      Cheap CD-R drives and the ability in basically every BIOS to boot directly from a CD completely killed any advantage the floppy had. Apple's decision to stop putting floppy drives in their computers was a response to the already-obvious obsolescence of the technology. They didn't kill the floppy, it was already dead by that point. PC makers kept including floppy drives in their machines for a while after that because some PC buyers wanted them for some reason and they were so cheap as to be practically f

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dahamma ( 304068 )

      That's why it's a perfect analogy! Netflix has about as much influence over the DVD business right now. They are equal levels of ridiculous hyperbole...

      Netflix often doesn't even have new releases on DVD for the first month they are out, and it takes them years, if ever, to get a movie on their streaming service after it's on DVD. That's not a particularly good way to "replace" something...

    • I would disagree. Even though in sales Apple wasn't so great. They had the public eye. Especially with the iMacs, A dramatic change from the White/Gray/Beige/Black (The Gray and Black PC were often for specialized systems) boxed PC Boxes that was so common. The Multi-colored Cute iMacs really got the public eye. (the first Girl friendly PC with enough processing power to allow a guy to use it without laughing) It got a lot of news attention. And other PC manufacturers took notice (Dell, Gateway 2000, Co

    • The Mac Zealot RDF version of history says "Apple stopped including floppies and they died off!" However if you look at what actually happened it was more like they stopped shipping floppies and users had to run out and buy USB floppy drives because there was no replacement. I remember at the newspaper I worked at when we got a bunch of iMacs for our newsroom, and they all needed to have floppy drives so that journalists could transfer stories to and from them.

      The floppy started dying when CD-RWs got cheap,

    • Apple has never been relevant enough on the desktop to kill any desktop technology. PC CD-Rs and then the internet killed floppy drives.

      If anything, one of the reasons I refused to buy an Apple back in those days was the lack of a floppy disk. I stayed with a floppy drive right up until USB flash drives were cheap enough and front-facing USB ports were ubiquitous. Actually, I stayed with them a little bit longer, until it was possible to flash my motherboard's bios with a thumb drive.

      I own apple computers now though (when they switched to Intel and I knew I could dual-boot windows).

    • It wasn't so much that Apple "killed" the floppy, but that they demonstrated that it was no longer needed. And they were proven right.
      The Windows-PC manufacturers got the message several years later, and finally killed it.

    • That and the fact the floppies never got above 1.44MB for standard capacity. I think there was an extended 2.88MB capacity but that was still not adequate for the needs at the time especially when CD-Rs were minimum 600MB or so. Apple was the first to stop deploying them in their machines.

  • No. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:01PM (#36849764) Homepage

    No, it's nothing like that. CD-ROMs were already well adopted by the time floppies came along, and there was no licensing issue going from floppy to optical media the way there is when going from optical to streaming.

    So no, the comparison isn't meaningful.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jaymz666 ( 34050 )

      Floppies only hold 1.44MB of data, compared to 640MB for a CD. It was capacity that killed the floppy. Reliability, too.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by MrEricSir ( 398214 )

        You're missing the point -- it's got nothing to do with one medium being "better" than another. People aren't clamoring to convert to BD-R disks even though they hold 10x what you can cram onto a DVD-R.

        The problem is and always has been that a new storage medium has to become cheap enough at the right time to solve a real problem, and it has to work well enough to convince people to spend time and money switching.

        By the time floppies "died," they were well-past their sell-by date, and CD-R drives were not

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jaymz666 ( 34050 )

          No, I guess my point is that we went from installing an application on 27 floppies in which one could be bad and kill the whole process, to installing an application on a single CD.
          Since DVDs are RO, that's what my comparison is based on

        • People here are having trouble separating "computers stopped coming with floppy drives" and "I was using CD-Rs long before machines stopped using floppies" ... also this is a thread about Netflix but the off-topic mod isn't being used properly.

    • CD-ROMs were already well adopted by the time floppies came along.

      Wha?

      .gnola emac seippolf emit eht by detpoda llew ydaela erew sMOR-DC

      There, FTFA.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jane Q. Public ( 1010737 )
      Uh, sorry, but that's simply not true.

      Floppy disks were around long before the CD was invented, much less the CD-ROM.

  • Totally false analogy. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:03PM (#36849792)
    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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • DVD are not really that much better compared to streaming you probably need to get off dialup.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      killing dvd deliveries kills netflix. simple as that. soon enough pretty much any company can license the stuff from studios, buy space and bandwidth from the cloud and that's it. but setting up the logistics for the dvd mailer system - now that's not something anyone can do.

  • Considering that Internet access is FAR removed from Universal and it's prohibitively expensive for many areas to stream video, I think not.

  • Maybe if they offered their entire DVD library via streaming. But even then, there are still many people who don't have streaming hooked up to their TV or are in a rural area where they have no access to broadband.

    • Maybe if they offered their entire DVD library via streaming. But even then, there are still many people who don't have streaming hooked up to their TV or are in a rural area where they have no access to broadband.

      I think those are the key points - until the back catalog of DVD movies / TV shows is available via streaming the DVD is likely, in some incarnation, here to stay. Even then, there is a sizable segment of the market for whom streaming is simply not an option. In addition, until there is a good way to save streamed material for times when there is no access available DVD's will still be a preferred medium.

      In addition, the fight over bandwidth caps and who can pays for usage will delay the adoption of stream

  • No (Score:5, Informative)

    by jaymz666 ( 34050 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:05PM (#36849816)

    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: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Never underestimate the bandwidth of a shopping bag loaded with DVDs.

      Well, okay, the bandwidth isn't that great, perhaps, but I'm pretty sure you'd hit your ISP's 'unlimited' (FUCK YOU ISPS) cap well before you'd hit the bag's maximum capacity. :p

    • Yup, that's how I watch movies because a large chunk of our U.S. internet is behind third world class in its ability to stream or even deliver movies in a timely manner. AT&T's trickle of a pipe (3 MB/sec) isn't sufficient with my family of four and my various other IT things going.
      • heh, that's 3 mbit /sec and no they can't or won't sell anything faster.

        • If you can get their DSL, they sell up to 6.0/1.5Mbps. You likely can get UVerse as well, which goes up to 25Mbps. Uverse uses the same lines, but different equipment is necessary at the neighborhood box.

  • Like Vanilla Ice? (Score:4, Funny)

    by geoffrobinson ( 109879 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:07PM (#36849852) Homepage

    like Vanilla Ice was able to kill our brain like a poisonous mushroom?

    Can we get any other good examples?

  • No, I don't think so - not for a while. The Redbox model is highly productive. People still want the premium editions, still want the Blu-Rays. Not everyone has the bandwith needed for high quality streaming. People still prize the reliability and dependency of physical media, ESPECIALLY with how sometimes things just disappear from Netflix. If Netflix is killing DVDs (Which I'll admit is possible), I don't see DVDs dying for about a decade, at least, as the content models have to shift first - and those gu
    • Redbox is doing things that I believe hurt its own model, though, too. Inventories have been split between Blue Ray and standard DVD (meaning fewer titles for either format). Now, with the addiiton of game titles, that further erodes the space available for a variety of titles. Of the last half-dozen times my wife and I have stopped at a Redbox location, we only rented once (though we intended to rent each time). We just couldn't find any titles that interested us in stock (the ones we wanted were alrea
  • In looking at how I consume media from Netflix I have basically been mostly a streaming customer since they have started expanding their selection. In the past year I have gotten 1 new DVD that I have gotten around to watching. I don't have cable and live in a low area so over the air digital TV is mostly out (I only get 2 channels now) so most of my "TV" is done streaming over the internet. My wife or I can watch most recent episodes of shows we like from Hulu, or directly from the networks, and for older shows and movies we can watch them off of Netflix. The $9 a month I pay is great for the all I can eat video buffet I currently enjoy, I don't even mind the commercials on the free Hulu or network sites since that is what you get when watching cable or over the air TV anyway. I would have had the internet connection I have anyway since I do push a lot of data in and out of my computer each month any way.

  • Bondi, not Blueberry (Score:3)

    by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:11PM (#36849936) Homepage

    For the record, the iMac that debuted without a floppy drive came in only one color: Bondi Blue. The Blueberry iMac was part of a later generation.

  • If he's right, and in 6 months to year the streaming library covers more than the DVDs, that would be awesome, and nobody would complain.

    I'm highly doubtful, as I've already watched many of my favorite things that were available for streaming get knocked off the service.

  • PC Games Killed the Floppy (Score:3)

    by chronosan ( 1109639 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:13PM (#36849960)
    But I don't think they can be blamed for DVD's demise. PC Games almost went from CD distribution direct to digital, very few years on DVD.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jaymz666 ( 34050 )

      Until downloaded games cost a LOT less than DVD games, that is what I will buy.
      If I lose the ability to sell something I paid for then I need a discounted purchase price.

  • Let me just say it and just get it out of the way:

    The DVD is dead. RIP.

  • The whole Netflix pricing thing was driven, at least in large part, by the industry increasing prices. I don't think it is completely unlikely that the industry (or the MPAA mafia if you prefer) P>

    Of course I'm talking about the same people who at first fought technology like the video tape, but now see a very significant share of their revenue come from DVD and Blu-Ray sales. While many wouldn't give them the credit to be smart enough to deliberately take action that might help phase out the DVD, I'm s

  • I was working at a big-name electronics store. I had a 100MB removable cartridge drive and that is about the same time that Superdrives -- 100MB drives that were backwards-compatible with 3.5" floppies -- became widely available.

    Just as so many others here have said: Apple didn't kill the floppy drive. They may have been one of the earliest companies to recognize that the floppy was already dead, but that's not the same thing.

  • If it's in the "cloud", in time, it will go away. Most "streaming" services seem to have a life of about five years. Size doesn't matter; WalMart Music and Microsoft PlaysForSure both went away. Zune may be going away, too.

    And if it's in the "cloud", cable companies can slowly cut off your air supply with bandwidth caps, forcing you to watch their "premium" services.

  • They're assuming that everyone has cheap, reliable, easily available broadband. Whether it be for movies, operating system downloads, or just everyday use, this is a patently false assumption. When the floppy was killed, DVD/CD media was an immediately available replacement for many, if not all users simply by visiting their local store. In this case, users are at the behest of other companies who do not have a financial incentive to provide service to many areas - let alone ensure reliability or access. This is before we even mention the picture & sound quality or the constant "rebuffering" waits. Yes, all you lovely people who loudly proclaim the death of physical media for downloading - many of us envy your ability to make that change. And before someone says "Well move to somewhere that it's available", I live in a major metropolitan area, top 25 DMA. The internet service sucks due to poor infrastructure, regardless of who you subscribe to. And let's not forget bandwidth caps. Downloading/streaming only is not yet a viable permanent solution.

  • It really feels like the Slashdot editors are shilling for Netflix lately - first a summary about how they "had" to raise prices, linking to an article without any data supporting that conclusion. Now an article about how it's "not so bad" - it's "progressive" and normal people just don't understand yet.

    I think Netflix provides a good service, but less than a year ago they had a dollar or two price hike for the sole purpose of forcing people from 1DVD to streaming-only plans, when they were released. An h

  • Apple fanboys are funny (Score:3)

    by 0123456 ( 636235 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:29PM (#36850238)

    Apple may have been among the first to stop supporting floppies, but only a fanboy would claim that removing them from Apple machines that made up a minute percentage of the desktop market somehow killed them. Floppies simply became obsolete, though I still had to find a floppy disk to install a BIOS upgrade on a new system as late as 2008.

  • ... the outcry is significant and it is problematic, but it's also important to note how quickly these things are forgotten.

    WRONG. Just because the media stops reporting on something after a week doesn't mean it's forgotten. The people who are pissed off remain pissed off a lot longer than that.

  • The only reason I put floppy drives in my PC builds back in the day was that most BIOS didn't seem to be able to reliably boot by other means. I had one floppy with master boot loader hanging out of my dell for years when linux didn't want to behave with my sketchy BIOS.

    Now that everything can boot by CDROM or DVD easily, or even USB, there ceased to be a need for them. USB memory killed it a long time ago, and before that CD's got cheap enough not to care.

    So one could point to any number of contributing re

  • I don't think Netflix is the only one with a vested interest in killing DVDs. I'd bet that the studios are anxious to move away from DVDs, with their effective lack of copy protection, and move towards streaming. With streaming solutions, the DRM can be modified with a software update, and non-compliant devices can be cut-off in the field without warning.

  • ...if netflix's streaming service had a much wider catalog to offer. And wasn't under constant threat from the content holders.

  • Neither one happened (Score:3)

    by hoppo ( 254995 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @02:56PM (#36850658)

    Apple killed the floppy? They killed a technology by omitting it from a product whose market share couldn't even be measured in single-digit percentages? I know Steve Jobs is amazing and all, but that's just super human.

    Apple merely recognized the obsolescence of the floppy disk, and omitted it because it was overhead that provided little value. Netflix is recognizing that streaming is the future of their business, and is acting to make that future as lucrative as possible.

    The article assumes these companies are causing trends, when they are merely reacting to them.

  • Floppy was not killed by Apple. (Score:3)

    by scorp1us ( 235526 ) on Friday July 22, 2011 @03:13PM (#36850942) Journal

    Floppy died a painfully slow death, but did thanks to Zip disks (100MB capacity, and could survive back-pack abuse much better than the 3.5" 1.44MB cousin) Which worked for a while (having to carry around the Zip drive... but really USB flash killed it all. Highly durable, will survive laundry. Small, fast, and accepted everywhere.

    DVDs in comparison are fragile. Scratched media. Over-powered lasers (lie on some Sony players) kill RW disks.

    And for those of us on the "edge" wireless and dropbox is replacing any media at all.

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