Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
Borders, maybe. But when was AOL ever great?!?! Unless it was the only possible way of getting onto the internet, AOL hands-down sucked compared to any of their peers or predecessors, namely Prodigy, CompuServe or Bubba's tin-can ISP. The only thing AOL ever did was support the CD production/duplication industry and the postal service.
If Netflix is using these two companies as a role model, they're already on the path to failure.
Granted what I was involved with was migrating and upgrading, but I saw hundreds of perfectly usable, 1-3 year old servers stacked in the old data center, hard drives pulled and drilled and the servers sold to a scrap company.
Complete and utter waste. I seriously doubt TFA servers will be treated any differently regardless of age.
What happens when two companies start working together, exchanging goods for services, etc? Their overhead goes up because now they are dealing with two different cost/profit models that are pulling from different budgets. Typically the primary reason for companies to merge is to reduce those costs and bring a service "inside."
The drilling companies will see a rise in costs because they won't have a parent company to absorb overages or internal costs. The refiner will see a rise in processing and administration fees having to deal with an "external" company. Add to both of these all the standards requirements, federal regulations, etc.
Bottom line is these costs will be passed on to the consumers so that BOTH companies can continue to make ungodly profits.
I made the mistake of trying to continue my movie high by going to see Transformers 3. Ugh! I dozed off several times, but didn't feel like I really missed anything. Besides the eye candy of Carly, the voice acting of Nimoy was the only decent part of the movie. Buzz Aldrin himself was just freaking cool, but not nearly enough to save this film. Such a shame for the franchise.
Add to this the people problem. Everyone I ever dealt with in the department I supported was extremely unskilled and ignorant of the knowledge they needed to know to do their job. I know for a fact that work days are short, especially Fridays and thanks to web monitoring software, I know most of the employees only spend about an hour a day of actual work. Now put this sluggish, ignorant person in charge of making a technical change to an application, a server or god forbid, a whole data center. Top it off with the IT barrage of regulations and procedures (SOX, ITIL, ISO, etc.) and you have the epitome of steering a huge ship with a small wooden paddle.
In the three years I supported them, I only ever saw one major implementation of new equipment, one successful disaster recovery exercise and multiple misses of the DNS SEC implementation.
With my inside knowledge I have no faith in our government in any department. I'm surprised ANYTHING gets done ever. Except, of course, pay raises. Those happen immediately, without fail and completely without merit.
In the Browse DVDs, yes, there are a few thousand. I look through the genres, searches or the recommended based upon my past ratings.
In the Starz Play, Netflix even posts a bullet of "Approximately 1,000 titles available from Starz Play" at the top.
I can only guess your tastes in movies are much, much broader than mine. We've been watching DVDs from Netflix the last 3 years. We basically caught up with all the movies we might have missed in the past few years, so now I watch for new releases, search for classics in the genres we like and catch up on TV series. I have about 75 in my DVD queue, but only 25 in the instant play.
Starz play is 38 pages of 31 titles (1178) plus another page of 18 for a total of 1196 titles. The *AGE* of most of those titles immediately decreases the value for a viewer wanting recent (last 20 years) movies. The number of series of old television shows (Gene Autrey, Perry Mason) further decreased the value.
With both the Netflix DVD on demand library and the Starz play, yes, there are several thousand titles. Unless you greatly enjoy old, low-rated or low-budget movies and shows, though, the selection is significantly smaller. For my tastes a few hundred, half of which I've watched over the last three years of my subscription.
I'm already checking into Amazon Prime and Blockbuster for my movie fix when I cancel Netflix.
2. My original TI 99-4/A, monitor, tape drive and cartridges are in the attic and make an appearance every 3 years or so.
3. DOSBox on my MacbookPro allows me to play any public domain PC games. Currently about to finish Ultima IV for the 30th time.
4. Go to work. I'm amazed anything can run on this 10 year old crap, but hey, I remember how to support it.
I saw this movie Friday, and while I didn't love it, I thought it was extremely enjoyable and a good fit with the rest of the Marvel stable of movies. Yes, it's a prequel and you know how it's going to end. Even so I thought the key story, the relationship between Charles and Eric and their back stories, was done very well. X-men has always been a gray area of debate, no clear good/bad side - Xavier's point of living peacefully with humans and Magneto's point of mutants dominating - are arguable from both points of view. This story set the baseline of that debate.
I thought it interesting that most of the cast was comprised of mostly unknown (to me) actors. Not being steeped in comic lore, I knew who a few characters were, but not all. The writers seem to expect viewers to know characters very well as they never once (that I caught) mentioned Riptide and only said Azazel a few times. i.e. for non-comic book mavens, a little more introduction would help.
I thought the main item lacking was the amount of action and especially working as a team. It's as if their powers were for display only. The montage of training and finding mutants was my favorite part of the entire movie. One point of annoyance was Banshee's mumble, but again, maybe that's part of his character and I just didn't know it.
If you try and lookup a few Marvel characters, you'll quickly realize that the movies can pick and choose any timeline or group they wish. Marvel has had so many reboots, re-writes and re-groupings it takes a real comic geek/genius to keep up with it all. I thought Havok was Cyclops' father by the movie timeline only to find out later he's his brother according to the comic history. I guess we're lucky to have anything resembling a thorough story for the movies.
I think she is brilliant on a business level. She's already screwed over the customers of Comcast and NBCU. Now she's going to screw over the tax payers by soliciting for funds to patch the sinking ship. Meanwhile she rakes in dumpster loads of cash while she shovels what remains of her morales out the door.
Guess I'll get the GMs in WoW to change it to "Phuquea" (phuq you EA)
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.