Correlation with one data point is not causation, idiot.
The alternative explanation is most Netflix employee work is so routine that anyone could do it - you could hire a mediocre, good or brilliant employee and you'd end up with the same result.
They're not a research lab. Aside from the people who do their marketing and negotiate with the film labels, they're not doing anything that anyone else could do - indeed, the pirates are far better at delivering the films I want to watch. They can't even write decent HTML/JS/CSS, but again, it's "good enough", so who cares?
Actually...Netflix does quite a lot of research. They are famous as being tireless in their quest to improve every aspect of their business...and while most of those changes are invisible to us there are still plenty that are quite apparent.
Remember back many years ago,when the return envelopes started showing up with the window cut-outs so that the bar code of the DVD could be scanned from the outside? That effectively saved them an entire day on DVD turnaround by allowing them to validate which subscribers had returned DVDs before having to actually process said incoming DVDS.
Netflix has actually worked so hard at optimizing their content delivery that they use AWS more effectively and efficiently than Amazon does. This is not even remotely trivial.
Netflix's recommendation algorithms have undergone multiple generations of evolution, and Netflix was very early as a pioneer of crowdsourcing before the term even existed.
And now, Netflix is deliberately trying to disassemble the current content delivery model whereby things are bundled and then bundled again. The show is bundled with other shows in the network, and the network is bundled with other channels in the cable/dish/FIOS package. Netflix is creating entire series and delivering them a la carte; they are also producing those series in a different way, based on what they have learned (through...wait for it...RESEARCH) about how people will consume such shows when they are made available all at once instead of parceled out an episode at a time over the span of months.
I get a kick out of how as soon as a company has a lot of market share, a widely shared opinion on Slashdot forms that they must somehow be predatory and evil. As I see it, Netflix came out of nowhere, defeated the existing and universally-despised incumbents, survived attempts by major companies to copy their business model (showing in the process that for all the simplicity exposed to the customer, Netflix really is doing some amazing stuff in the back-end operations) and continued to deliver good customer service. I've never had a bad experience with Netflix, and that's saying something after over a decade as one of their customers. Seems to me that they're what I want big companies to be like...unlike pretty much every other company in the entertainment industry. Do I like every single solitary thing they do? No. I don't like every single solitary any company...or person...does. But when they say that X is part of their secret to success, I tend to believe them. It seems to me that they know more about how they got where they are than any of us do.