I once worked at a company that had a successful product ($40M in sales, $15M in arr via support plans). They did a rewrite, that of course went a year long and was poorly handled by sales and marketing ie it was talked about freely with customers and prospects; contributed to sales drying up while they all waited for the new hotness.

I knew the rewrite was going take a lot longer than they were saying, both due to common sense and because there were conflicting goals from ceo and cto.

I went to the ceo and made a case for a back up plan, myself and a few others could continue on the old busted version; bug fixes and minimal enhancements only, insurance if you will. I really thought about buying it but had no way to finance anything like that. CEO didn’t bite and was in process of selling the company to a PE firm.

I left when the new version finally shipped with half the features and twice the bugs. The PE installed CEO wrecked the sales org and sales never recovered.

As a side note, a foreign firm had pirated a much older version 10 years prior, rebranded and was #3 with it in that market.

Netflix did something sort of like that when they split off shipping dvds into a completely different unit.

They announced it (Qwikster, I believe), and then they immediately canceled that plan after massive backlash.

It’s back. DVD.com is Netflix’s DVD by mail business.

Really? I wonder how it will compete with Redbox? We rarely watch movies (we don't even have a Netflix subscription), but when we do it is a spur of the moment thing so we just run around the corner to redbox and grab something. Waiting for a movie in the mail? That's so 2010 ;-)

Netflix still has almost 3 million DVD subscribers. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/250940/quarterly-number-...)

They compete by having a larger library.

But before you get too smug, the idea of going to Redbox to get a physical disc is not exactly cutting edge compared to just clicking on a button and renting a movie on demand from your cable provider/Apple/Amazon/Google/Vudu.

Sorry if I came off as smug. Wasn't my intent. We typically spend about $1-2 a month on Redbox. Any streaming movie rental would be at least four times that amount.

Usually $3.99-$5.99.

I’m lazier than I am cheap.

But honestly, most of my movies fall off the back of a truck onto my Plex server.

And I was just giving you hard time about being smug.....

> We rarely watch movies (...), but when we do it is a spur of the moment thing so we just run around the corner to redbox and grab something (...)

I find it fascinating that this is core idea that made Netflix so successful, they just rely on much lazier customers than you!

Their library was far bigger than any storefront. Even if you never used the more rare stuff, it was a selling point.

Yeah, that is a good example of a company making a badly timed business decision and ultimately recovering completely unscathed (although it seemed like they were in hot water at the time).

Isn't this kind of what Alphabet did?