Gina Keating

The history of internet commerce is, famously, littered with spectacular failures – concepts that should have worked brilliantly, but flamed out instead. Even Netflix – one of the striking exceptions – had teetered close to that edge more than once. Its co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings struggled to find a workable business model, underestimated the potential of DVD-rental kiosks, and handled plans to separate streaming and DVD-by-mail services so badly that “Quixster” joined New Coke and the Edsel in the corporate-innovation hall of infamy.

Netflixed acknowledges these failures, but it is primarily concerned with success. Its core narrative traces the history of Netflix from its Silicon Valley origins in the late 1990s to its domination of the home video market in the mid-2000s, using the company’s struggle with bricks-and-mortar rival Blockbuster Video as a centerpiece. Gina Keating, a business journalist, keeps the focus squarely on the corporate side of the story. Senior managers’ decisions about capitalization, marketing, pricing, and similar matters are described and analyzed in exhaustive detail, backed by her extensive interviews with key players. Aspects of the story that take place beyond the boardroom – changes in technology, the impact of DVDs on home-viewing patterns, Netflix user’s experience of the service – are pushed to the narrative margins.

How much you enjoy Netflixed will, as a result, depend a great deal on what you hope to get from it. If you’re looking for a business book along the lines of Ken Auletta’s Googled, Adam Cohen’s The Perfect Store (EBay), or Robert Spector’s Get Big Fast (Amazon) -- a “corporate biography” that admires its subject’s successes and treads lightly around its faults – you’ve found it. If you’re hoping for something like Joshua Greenberg’s From Betamax to Blockbuster that imbeds the business in a rich social, cultural, and technological context, this may feel like too much about too little.

I fall squarely in the second category, and I frequently found myself skimming the details even though the main story held my interest. If you’re in the first category, though – if you habitually read business books for fun – add a star (or a star-and-a-half) to my rating, and enjoy.… (mere)