I was happy to see them reverse this decision. However, I feel they definitely lost some customer goodwill, which it will take them a while to regain. For instance, I was strongly considering buying the new Roku device that connects to your TV and home network to let you access the “watch instantly” movies/shows from Netflix’s website on your TV instead of a computer. But since this episode, I am now far less enthusiastic. Also, I’ve started looking a little more closely at the Blockbuster online advertisements.

Netflix has worked hard to build their brand as a trusted enhancement of your movie watching experience, through features such as separate queues, ratings and recommendations, user reviews, social networking with friend lists/recommendations, etc. But the flip side of insinuating themselves more deeply into your life than being “just a movie rental service” means that customers feel a sense of betrayal when they propose to remove a beloved feature. Some commenters on various blogs and forums asked the reasonable question of “What’s the big deal? If you don’t like the service anymore, just cancel.” To which others replied “I’ve spent many hours rating movies and recommending them to my friends as encouraged to by Netflix. Now they’re going to just delete all that data, erasing in essence a small piece of my online identity.”

I guess the business lesson is that you can’t have it both ways; you don’t get to both have your customers be “emotionally invested” in your brand to keep them loyal in the face of price and feature competition, and expect them to react dispassionately when you make a seemingly reasonable decision to remove a feature that is expensive and complicated to maintain and only used by a small percentage of users. Note the way they sign off in the above email: “Your friends at Netflix”. Dear Netflix: if you want me to think of you like a friend, you need to act like one.

It seems like a PR storm is already brewing, judging from the following links I found with a quick search:
cnet
pcmag
slashdot
gmsv
yahoo
arstechnica
savenetflixprofiles.com

It will be interesting to see if Netflix persists with the decision in light of how unpopular it seems to be. Here’s the text of the comment I left on their blog post:

I want to add my voice to the chorus of disappointed Netflix customers. The marketplace for TV/movie entertainment is certainly getting crowded; here’s a partial list of the competition:

Blockbuster Online, Amazon Unbox, Peerflix, Hulu, Joost, Azureus Vuze, the TV networks own websites, Comcast On Demand, stealing via Bittorrent, etc.

With the ill will generated by this move, it gives all of Netflix’s customers a reason to go look at the alternatives. And not just those of us who use and love the feature - anyone else who is a current or prospective customer and hears about this boneheaded move will then be wondering when their favorite feature might be next, and whether their money might be better spent elsewhere.

Finally, here’s a picture that I think sums the whole thing up nicely:

(image courtesy of worldoffail.com)

One of my only complaints is that I watched too many of the trailers, which gave away too many of the good moments from the film. Maybe the studio felt they needed to do this to build buzz, since Iron Man is less well known than other Marvel characters?

/me, working from home to save energy on commuting

“Ongoing turmoil in the troubled kitchen-floor region of the Branson household reached a boiling point Tuesday, as relations between rival house cats Boswell and Johnson erupted into fresh violence.”

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/kitchen_floor_conflict_intensifies

This morning our cat Leo was meowing as usual at the sliding glass door to our deck wanting to go outside. The wind was whistling away with sheets of rain falling, and I tried to explain to him that he wouldn’t like it, but as you may know cats can be stubborn. I slid the door open a few inches and a huge gust of wind and rain blasted in, causing Leo to leap backwards in the air about 3 feet and tear off into the bedroom to hide under our bed.

http://news.therecord.com/Business/article/236315

It would be funny if his coworkers put a sign on it which read “Welcome your new robot overlord!”.

Trivia: I used to work for iAnywhere for a while after they acquired AvantGo, which I had been working at. We were moved into the offices of iAnywhere’s parent company Sybase, and unfortunately (as far as I know) there were no robots roaming the halls there. That would have made it much cooler.

I can imagine lots of applications for this, both good (remove your ex from that awesome group shot from a few years back) and evil (alter photographic evidence being presented at a trial). I guess an interesting but probably much harder next step would be to use similar algorithms to transform a video stream.

One of the fun things about a movie like this is that it gives the critics good material to work with when pointing out its shortcomings. Here are two of my favorites:

How can a pickup truck contain enough mass to unfold into a towering machine? I say if Ringling Brothers can get 15 clowns into a Volkswagen, anything is possible. (Roger Ebert)

No screen cut lasts more than two seconds, and the good robots and bad robots all look exactly alike. I could never tell who was winning, who was losing, who had The Cube, or why it mattered so much in the first place. They could have spliced in battle footage from Godzilla and it would have made just as much sense. (Rex Reed)

http://www.itconversations.com/series/technometria.html

He has had on some great guests and facilitates really interesting and informative discourse. Highly recommended.

Also, the entire ITConversations project is really great.

http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshufflev10.htm

It seems to do some tricks that raise the hackles of my anti-spyware software; the program itself claims to contain no malware and I did a little searching on the net to make sure no one was reporting otherwise, and didn’t see anything troubling. I’ve also submitted it to my security suite’s vendor for checking just in case, but I went ahead and installed it (trust, but verify).

Unfortunately installing vmware-tools inside of Ubuntu Dapper Drake does not by default give you the ability to resize your desktop - I was getting an error message during the tools config saying “No X install found”. I spent some time searching the web, reading the vmware forums, etc. and finally found some nice people who had come up with a solution. Even once you have installed it using these instructions, you need to use the Preferences->Screen resolution menu from inside Ubuntu to do it instead of just resizing the vmware menu. Anyhow, here are the instructions.

1. Start up a terminal window and do the following:

   sudo bash
   apt-get install build-essential
   apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
   

2. Get the patch text from here and drop it into /tmp/patch.txt.

   [Update: changed the link to a locally cached copy, since the original source seems to be down]

3. Get the vmware-tools-any update by doing this:

   cd /tmp
   wget http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-tools-any-update1.tar.gz
   tar xzf vmware-tools-any-update1.tar.gz
   

4. From vmware menu, choose vm->install vmware tools - you should see a mounted CD image show up on the desktop. Back in your terminal window, do the following:

   cd /tmp
   tar xzvf /cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz
   cd vmware-tools-distrib/
   ./vmware-install.pl
   

   During vmware-install.pl, I chose the default answers to everything but at the end did not choose to launch vmware-config-tools.pl.

5. Then do this in your terminal:

   cd /tmp/vmware-tools-any-update1/
   ./runme.pl
   

   Again, choose to not run vmware-config-tools.pl yet

   cd /usr/bin
   patch vmware-config-tools.pl /tmp/patch.txt
   ./vmware-config-tools.pl
   

6. Lastly, you can edit your config to use the vmware mouse:

   perl -p -i.bak -e 's/\"mouse\"/\"vmmouse\"/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   

The next step was to radio for emergency landing clearance.

“They came back and asked what my problem was,” he said. “I told them I had one hand full of snake and the other hand full of plane. They cleared me in.”

box.net: 15GB storage, 50GB/mo transfer, 9.99/mo
omnidrive: “approximately $70 per year for 10GB (or more)”
xdrive: 5GB, unlimited transfer?, $8.29/mo
strongspace: 4GB, unlimited transfer, $8/mo

For comparison purposes, here’s the storage you can get with a web hosting package from 3 popular hosting providers:

dreamhost: 20GB storage, 1TB/mo transfer, $7.99/mo
godaddy: 50GB storage, 500GB/mo transfer, $6.99/mo
1and1: 100GB storage, 1000GB/mo transfer, $9.99/mo

Finally, amazon.com’s S3 storage service is .15/GB/mo for storage and .20/GB/mo for bandwidth, so you could get:

amazon S3: 25GB storage, 25GB/mo transfer, $8.75/mo

I understand that the online storage providers are giving customers easier and more convenient ways to get at this storage than they get with a web host. But I think at this point it’s mostly tech savvy people who can understand even these simplified interfaces. My feeling is that since many of their potential users are also savvy enough to understand how to use [s]ftp/rsync/scp/webdav to access the storage that web hosts or amazon provides, they really need to compete more aggressively on GB per dollar to get more business.