Just finished rereading Netflixed. Good quick tale of the founding through Qwickster. Renewed appreciation for how farsighted and bold Netflix was. At almost every decision point, they went for broke. I want to focus on one of those, because it’s pretty wild. Total Access.
Blockbuster couldn’t find a way to overcome Netflix head to head. But market research showed ability to combine rental by mail with in store was a game changer. Amazingly Blockbuster stores were not wired (2007!) so they had to rig a system to connect online and in store rentals.
Netflix immediately realized the threat. “Had to find a way to make Total Access disappear, because ... no good way to counterprogram”
Total Access grabbed 1M subs in two months and was taking over 100% share. Netflix modeled that it was bankrupting Blockbuster, So Hastings invited Antioco to a meeting in Sundance.
Hastings told Antioco he was spending the company into ruin and offered to buy Blockbuster Online subs. He later followed up with $200/sub offer. Antioco demurred, realizing he had Netflix on the ropes.
Now the fun starts. At Blockbusters Board meeting. Antioco suggested they turn down the offer. The Board agreed. Then turned to his comp. He had hit the targets set by the Comp Committee so expected perfunctory approval. Icahn exploded. Icahn was on the Comp Committee!
Antioco sues the Board. Late one Friday night, after midnight and apparently a few martinis, Icahn called him at home. Antioco‘s wife ran and got him a bottle of tequila, which wow absolute hero of the story, and they proceeded to go bonkers at each other.
TL,DR: Antioco quits, and against all logic instead of hiring the COO, Icahn hires an ex 7-11 retail guy whose plan is to do everything that Blockbuster already tried and failed at. After he laid out his plan, the entire exec team sold most or all of their stock next open window!
Meanwhile at Netflix, they cut guidance and announced subscriber losses.
The architect of Blockbuster Online quickly left after the new CEO came in. He ended up at a dinner with Hastings. “You had us in checkmate” Hastings told him.
There are always what if stories on the road to domination - Yahoo buying Google etc - and Netflix is no different, except they may have more than most. But what if Icahn hadn’t gone full Icahn is one of my favorites, because of course he’s Carl freaking Icahn /end
Early on Hastings had proposed Blockbuster buy Netflix for $50M
One guy who ran the numbers and figured Blockbuster wouldn’t have the stomach for mutually assured destruction was @mariocibelli. He is the OG Netflix 🐂.
I ran out of space, but this was savage. Not only did the Blockbuster execs sell all their stock, they bought Netflix stock! Not sure I know of any other example like this
Two very interesting articles filled with unusually specific details about Israeli spying activities on Hezbollah printing in separate papers the same day. The why here as interesting as the what.
The FT in particular goes into greater details sourced from Israeli officials
Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria exposed them in a way they hadn’t before. Particularly their interactions with Syrian and Russia intelligence services.
"the street is modeling $167B in cumulative AI capex, which is enough to support over 12,000 ChatGPTs.
We think one of the big players may blink and cut back the capex plans, but not likely until we get well into 2025 or beyond"
"Based on these estimates, Google is assuming around 180T AI text queries (both input and output) and 15T AI image queries. This is a staggering figure, as there are around 11T web search queries per year right now worldwide. Stated differently, Google’s AI capex assumes a market that is 15x-20x larger than the web search market by 2026"
"Based on the 2026 consensus AI inference capex above, we estimate that the industry is assumed to produce upwards of 1 quadrillion AI queries in 2026. This would result in over 12,000 ChatGPT-sized products to justify this level of spending, illustrated below."
Reading the Nadella/Scott interviews, and the transcript from JPM of Alysa Taylor who heads Commercial Cloud GTM, you get insights on 3 key topics:
1) frontier models vs models-as-a-service 2) confidence in demand relative to capex spend 3) MSFT's attempts at differentiation
Asked about vertical integration in AI, Nadella says "I'm more of the believer in the horizontal specialization".
More importantly, he goes on: "So I think any enterprise application, really what they're most excited about is models-as-a-service".
Mark Murphy asks: "re: foundation models do you expect we're going to see some convergence in capabilities or do you suspect... we're going to see sustained performance differential"
Alysa Taylor, heavily cribbing from AWS: "We don't believe there is one model to rule them all"
Something that was noticeable, on each of MSFT peer review slides for Apple, Amazon and Google, they highlighted progress on proprietary chips
And then the Azure and Windows slides both have develop custom silicon chips as long term drivers. We knew that this was the case, but just interesting to see them highlight other co's successes and set goals for it.
"base of our stack, our custom silicon efforts will help us remain competitive.. Our efforts will be a mix of internal and partnership... ultimately, we will need to become a first-class provider of chipset designs, especially the most critical chips given our scale in the cloud"
FTC request for comments on hyperscalers interesting. Can tell a lot by each participants responses.
ORCL/NET: whining about egress fees
GOOG: whining about MSFT/ORCL leveraging on prem biz to win cloud
MSFT: "very competitive market, even IBM"
AWS: history and tutorial on cloud
this is arguably more descriptive from AWS then anything they've said to investors about AI
Google complaining about MSFT and ORCL and then pitching Workspaces right in the doc. ABC guys, ABC.