Thursday, January 3, 2008

Hastings of Netflix joins the Denial Boyz

"If (Apple) does what has been reported, they will reach a very big market," Hastings said. "But the addition of Apple to the rental market isn’t causing us to lose any sleep." ~Reed Hastings, Netflix

"The co-CEO of Research In Motion Ltd., which makes the popular line of BlackBerry email devices, said in an interview at RIM's Waterloo headquarters that he's not losing sleep over Apple's efforts to upend the wireless market in much the same way as its wildly popular iPod music devices changed the way people acquire and listen to music." ~Jim Balsillie, RIM

"We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,'' he said. "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.'' ~Ed Holigan, Palm

"We're expecting a good fight but they're coming out with something [iPod Shuffle] that's five generations older. It's our first generation MuVo One product feature, without display, just have a (shuffle feature). We had that — that's a four-year-old product. So I think the whole industry will just laugh at it, because the flash people — it's worse than the cheapest Chinese player. Even the cheap, cheap Chinese brand today has display and has FM. They don't have this kind of thing, and they expect to come out with a fight; I think it's a non-starter to begin with." ~Sim Wong Hoo, Creative

"Screw the nano," said Zander. "What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs? People are going to want devices that do more than just play music, something that can be seen in many other countries with more advanced mobile phone networks and savvy users," he said. ~Ed Zander, (formerly) Motorola

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance," said Ballmer. "It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get." ~Steve Ballmer, Microsoft

""We're going to be communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod." ~William Gorog, Napster

And of course....when asked what he would do if he were Apple's CEO:

“What would I do? I’d shut it down,” replied Michael Dell, “and give the money back to the shareholders.” ~Michael Dell

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gene you win analyst of the year. Great, funny post!

Anonymous said...

Before Netflix, Reed Hastings was CEO of Performix. It was a load-testing software company, and competed with Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner. Performix ended up begin acquired by Rational software for a few million dollars. Mercury Interactive was acquired by HP for $4.7 BILLION. Reed has not shown a great ability to compete on a head-to-head basis.