No One Will Ever Want a Personal Computer

I don’t care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies doesn’t matter if I don’t want to see any of the movies that we have . . . our assortment is heavily weighted toward newer releases and mainstream staple titles.1

The quote comes from an interview with Blockbuster’s CEO, who evidently finds Netflix’s success very confusing. Every one of his comments reminds me a great deal of the infamous claim by Ken Olson, the President of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977, that,

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.2

It’s rare that you get a chance to watch a CEO of a once thriving corporation publicly reveal his inability to adapt to a changed market. There is a sort of schadenfreude joy to it, along with a reminder that no monopoly is permanent under capitalism.