alt Hacker NewsTwo anecdotes I'll share:
First: Most people believe it was Netflix that killed Blockbuster, but that's not strictly correct. It was the combination of Netflix and Redbox that really sealed the deal for Blockbuster (and video rental generally). It normally takes not one, but at least two things to really fill the full functionality of a old paradigm. Also it's human nature to focus heavily on one thing (Blockbuster was aware of Netflix) but lose sight of getting flanked by something else.
Second: Not listed here is how banks themselves have changed to be almost entirely online, which in many cases is more of a outsourcing play than a labor destruction play. My favorite example of this is Capital One, where the vast majority of their credit card operations literally cannot be solved in a branch. You must call them to say, resolve a fraud dispute. Note that this still requires staffing and is (not yet) fully automated, just not branch staffing. It doesn't make sense to staff branches to do that.
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The thing that actually killed Blockbuster was Carl Icahn. He bought up a bunch of shares and wanted to quickly turn a profit on the company. At the time, they were investing heavily into a Netflix-like service, which required a significant up front capital investment and, therefore, was losing money. Icahn, wanting to make a profit, decided to cut spending and basically not look forward at all. He got a quick, massive bump in stock price and jumped ship as it was crashing into the iceberg. Blockbuster was caught in the middle of a paradigm shift and found itself massively under prepared to deal with it.
American Express savings has no physical branches. Heck its not unique to them, there's other banks with no physical branches.
> Not listed here is how banks themselves have changed to be almost entirely online
Sorry what? Was this not the central theme of the article? (albeit with a title that used the word "iPhone" to be catchier)
>most people belive
Instead of chastising people with another guess you could find the source. The founders of blockbuster knew it would eventually fail. Short version, they knew once people watched the huge initial backlog revenues would plummet. The plan was to build everywhere and capture that initial high income. Afterwords, well whatever.
Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster's Inevitable Bust
I have a hard time believing that Redbox had much of an impact on Blockbuster, and they certainly weren't changing the video rental paradigm.
Netflix's original DVD-rental by mail business no doubt ate into Blockbuster's business to some degree, and with their huge inventory was more of a head-on competitor than Redbox which could only offer a vending-machine full of options - the most popular ones.
What really killed Blockbuster was streaming video, not just a way of "automating" the DVD rental business - it was the paradigm shift, similar to the mobile banking vs ATM shift that TFA describes.