Although it's obvious they were wrong about Hastings in hindsight, I can't disagree with their reasoning (I'm guessing this was before Netflix streaming). And if Netflix hadn't launched a streaming service, it's clear that Hastings would be a nobody.
Well, that's kinda the point: in predicting Hastings wouldn't be relevant, they were predicting that Netflix would not notice the decline of the DVD (or at least not know what to do about it), and wouldn't start offering a streaming service. But in fact, Hastings did see this coming, and so they started a streaming service. So the article... swing and a miss.
But Hastings-led Netflix DID launch streaming so I'm not sure what your point is. They would have needed to predict that for some bizarre reason Netflix would not do the obvious thing and get into streaming.
I believe I had even read somewhere in an interview that the reason Netflix had "Net" in it was because of their long term plans to move towards streaming, not because users selected movies on a website. In other words, it sounded like the founders had originally planned to focus on a streaming service.
Clearly Hastings read this article in 2006, screamed at his assistant, "Holy shit dvds are going away?!" and started up the streaming project that saved Netflix's future the same weekend.
Well played Business 2.0 Magazine Staff. History may ridicule you but Reed Hastings has one month of free netflix streaming for each of you.
