Re:It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube
by Darrengineer on Friday February 24, 2023 @03:09PM
(#34929423)
> Netflix very much had a dominant position in DVD rentals at its height.
Is this true? My recollection being a netflix DVD customer is that brick and mortar rental stores were dominant until netflix streaming upended the DVD rental dynamic. Would love to see some data on it though!
Re:It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube
by scarface_74 on Friday February 24, 2023 @03:15PM
(#34929495)
There is a long story about how just when it looked like the combination of BlockBuster brick and mortar + mail in was about to deal the killing blow to Netflix, Carl Icahn came in and snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.
https://hbr.org/2011/04/how-i-did-it-blockbusters-former-ceo...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/22/how-netflix-almost-lost-the-...
Apple had a dominant position in selling music and in music players by 2006. It was the number one music retailer in the US. It very much used that to get into the phone market and part of its early success in the App Store was that it was built on top of iTunes and it already had more credit cards on file than any other company in the US besides Amazon.
If you're not arguing that a company shouldn't branch out, are you arguing that once a company gets a certain size, it shouldn't be allowed to invest those profits and resources into another industry?
By 2011, Apple was the most valuable company in the US. Should it not have been allowed to start selling watches, home stereo equipment and AirPods?