Well, that didn’t last long. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced that this whole idea of a separate site with a separate, kind of weird name, just for DVDs will not go forward after all. Things will go back to the way it was, which is always the dearest wish of web customers dealing with change “JUST CHANGE IT BACK!” Or rather, things went back to the way things actually still were since Qwikster wasn’t yet live.
I’ll be honest, when I heard the headline news this morning: “Netflix abandons Qwikster”, I just assumed that it was Netflix walking away from DVD entirely. It’s a dying technology, no other company is really trying to do it.
As stupid as Qwikster was from a nomenclature standpoint, it was a perfect out for Netflix. If the Qwikster division failed, and it was bound to as people stopped using DVDs, Netflix could come off looking shrewd by cutting loose a dying business. Now they’re stuck with it because while Netflix was eager to give up DVDs, people weren’t.