The biggest problem was a complete lack of understanding of the industry within corporate leadership.<p>I spent many years in at Hollywood Video corporate in the late 2000s and saw much of it first hand. Blockbuster didn't understand what was going on and Hollywood was too busy trying to copy Blockbuster. Neither of them saw Netflix as a threat until it was too late.<p>Just as the article mentions, the VCR revolutionized the viewing experience for Boomers who were used to waiting for something to come on TV. The video chains experienced insane success, and thought they could ride that formula out for decades.<p>Netflix revolutionized movie entertainment for Gen-X and millennials who were used to and unimpressed by VHS/DVD rental models. The execs at the top (boomers) ignored the new fangled streaming stuff because they didn't use it, didn't understand it, and most of all didn't see the value.<p>The younger of us working at Hollywood saw the writing on the wall in the early 2000s as Netflix was making it's climb. The even younger folks working at the stores knew it even better. But none of us could convince anyone at the top that it was important, until the late 2000s when they made a half assed attempt to be an "also does" to the then dominant Netflix.<p>When you're in a fast moving business, you don't bet everything on what's happening now, you've got to think about what's coming soon...
The second page of the article (<a href="http://daindunston.com/blockbuster-the-customer-owns-your-purpose/" rel="nofollow">http://daindunston.com/blockbuster-the-customer-owns-your-pu...</a>) paints a fairly convincing picture that Jim Keyes was a disastrous idiot as CEO that basically wrecked the company, and that Carl Icahn was an idiot for ousting the previous CEO and installing Keyes. Is there any evidence to the contrary? It seems so clear cut in the article that I want to question it.
I miss Blockbuster, or at least video rental stores. I'm way past the phase of life where owning a collection of movies seems like a good idea, and am tired of companies with their hand in my pocket every month. There was also a sense of occasion- it was a place to go to, everybody got something they wanted, and the family was committed to spending a couple hours together afterward. Browsing the Netflix isn't the same- talk about “managed dissatisfaction"...
> Know what business you are in.<p>This is the same point Steve Jobs makes in this clip,<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBma82g3Uag" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBma82g3Uag</a>
I think this was more a perfect storm of problems: Netflix coming on the scene, Blockbuster having terrible customer service/fees, and the wishy-washy corporate leadership.
It seems to me there are two components involved in being a successful disruptor:<p>1. Be competent at what you do.
2. Have your main competitor be grossly incompetent.<p>What this article and its successor indicate is that Netflix satisfied both of these criteria: when, in 2007, Blockbuster had a fairly sensible Netflix-style plan in place, Carl Icahn instated a new CEO who chose to completely demolish it. Had Blockbuster not done this, it's entirely possible Netflix would have not have had room to grow (as Lyft experienced after Uber launched UberX to muscle out Lyft's not-just-black-car model).<p>I feel that Hacker Newsies get a little wrapped up in the party line of libertarian economics being the ultimate meritocracy, ignoring that capitalism is essentially just an oligopoly with the meritocratic potential to fail only in the case of gross incompetence (which, incidentally and curiously in practice, happens on a fairly regular basis).<p>Also, I feel things will work better as we try to structure things in a way that disabuses ourselves of the notion that things are working the way they should. Companies still ask questions in the hiring process under the pretext that their employees should want to perpetuate their current operating procedure. Admitting that things are broken, even slightly, leads to smart, sensible people being cast aside, in favor of those who will blindly go down with the ship. This teaches the workforce to be more lemming-like, in order to be hireable.
Even if Blockbuster management had done everything right in the stores, the stores would still be dead. The <i>entire video rental store industry</i> is gone in the US.
I don't miss Blockbuster as much as I miss Tower Records. For a music and book fan it was a true community center. The only problem is that I would inevitably end the book store tour at Borders so I guess too many retailers was a common thread those days.