指尖阅读—你的生涯你做主（十三）

今天的指尖阅读，我们将一起读《the start-up of you》的下一部分

The Path to the Future

In 1997 Reed Hastings, a software entrepreneur living in the hills of SiliconValley, was faced with a problem. He had rented Apollo 13 from a video store,returned it days late, and was dealt a late fee so nasty that he was too embarrassed to tell his wife what had happened. His entrepreneurial instinctkicked in: what if you could rent a movie and never face the risk of a late fee? So he began researching the industry and learned that the new DVD technology was light and cheap to ship. He realized that the shift towarde-commerce, in concert with the DVD revolution, could be a huge opportunity. So that year he launched a business that combined e-commerce with old – fashioned postal mail: customers would select their movie on a website, receive a DVD ofthe movie in the mail, and then mail it back whenever they were finished. It was a compelling idea, but Reed knew from his years in the technology industry that it would inevitably evolve. He avoided calling his business DVDs-by-Mail (or some other name that was specific to the business’s current iteration) and instead came up with a more expansive company name: Netflix.

Netflix wasn’t instantly successful. Originally, customers paid for each DVD they rented, like at Blockbuster, the industry gorilla that operated thousands of video rental stores worldwide. It didn’t catch on. So Reed began offering monthly subscription plans that allowed unlimited rentals. Yet customers still complained that it took too long from the time they selected a flick online to when it arrived in the mail. In 1999 he set up a meeting at Blockbuster’s headquarters in part to discuss possibly partnering on local distribution and faster fulfillment. Blockbuster was not impressed. "They just about laughed us out of their offices, "Reed recalls.

Reed and his team kept at it. They perfected their distribution center network so that more than 80 percent of customers received overnight delivery of movies.They developed an innovative recommendation engine that prompted users with movies they might like based on past purchases. By 2005 Netflix had asubscriber base four million strong, had fended off competition from imitations like Walmart’s online movie-by-mail effort, and became the king of online movie rentals. In 2010 Netflix made a profit of more than $160 million. Blockbuster,in comparison, failed to adapt to the Internet era. The year it filed for bankruptcy.

Netflix is not resting. In fact, in 2010 and 2011 the company shifted focus from its still profitable DVD-by-mail business and jumped to the next curve: instant online streaming of movies and TV shows to computers, smartphones, and tablet devices. It’s something they’d wanted to do for years, and wide-scale broadband adoption now allows it. The majority of customers now watch TV shows and movies via streaming rather than by DVD, and, at the time of writing. Netflix accounts for more than 30 percent of all internet traffic during the week. Soon, online streaming may well feature significant Netflix original programming, or incorporate some new technology not yet invented. Nonetheless, their ongoing success is not assured. There are always new challenges.

“Most of the time, change in the world overtakes you,” Reed says. When a Hollywood executive once asked him during an on-stage interview whether he makes five-year strategic plans or three-year strategic plans, Reed said he does neither: three years is an eternity in Silicon Valley, and they can’t plan thatfar in advance. Instead, Netflix stays nimble and iterates, always in the test phase. We call this mind-set “permanent beta”.