I'm not actually arguing that Netflix aren't dominant - or that they shouldn't be.
My point is that when they started it's not as if it was a slam dunk that people who thought of movie renting as going down to the store and choosing from a wide selection at your fingertips were suddenly going to decide, days in advance, which movies they wanted to watch. It was a risk and it took quite some time to take off. In the meantime - and before - Blockbuster already had a load of real estate they had to utilise - so even if they had wanted to just morph into Netflix (at that time a small operation) it was by no means the only reasonable way to go. The rest is history. Doesn't mean Blockbuster were necessarily idiots or lazy or complacent.
e.g. - from a 2002 report on e-commerce
Quote:
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Stores that already have an established brand and on-the-ground distribution will soon dominate over pure dotcoms, forcing the surviving dotcoms to merge with a brick-and-mortar chain, or a brand with many physical outlets.
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At the start of 2002 that didn't seem an unreasonable analysis. If you bet on it though - depending on your industry you could have lost quite a lot of money - hence the dotcom crash at the start of that decade.
Cheers
