Ooh, ooh, ooh! I love "Amazon should buy Netflix" articles. It's the HN equivalent of "first!" to say that Amazon won't buy Netflix because it would give them a business nexus in a lot of states and require them to collect sales tax there. Ergo, never gonna happen, at least not without some financial sleight of hand like the $175 million "investment" in LivingSocial.
A long tome ago when I was an MBA student, I asked my prof and peers why does company X buy company Y, when both X and Y are healthy companies, in the context of techology companies. The most common answer is "synergy" or cost savings . But my point was that if acquirer is a mature company and acquiree is a young startup, the young startup would have a higher growth rate than the mature company. Also the young startup would have more freedom than a mature public company, whose decisions making would be rigid as they are driven by the quarterly earnings expectation. It seems to me that the savings /synergy would be dwarfed by the dampening of the growth rate of the startup. Not to mention that the startup would bleed talent as they move on. Consider Cisco and Flip : Flip stopped innovating and taking risks after the acquisition and was eventually killed off. I understand Netflix is not a startup but they are just as scrappy and I believe their best products are yet to come. Yahoo has also acquired so many companies and I do not believe they managed to achieve their goals at all( unless it was to make Mark Cuban a billionaire). In my opinion, if the management of Amazon thinks they have excess cash, they should just pay dividends to the investors.<p>So do you still think Amazon buying Netflix is a good idea ?