In his post, Randolph noted that, in Netflix's early years, the company stopped selling DVDs and renting movies a la carte. Netflix wanted to focus on streaming, so the company removed legacy features that slowed down this development wherever possible. Of course customers were angry, but Netflix ignored them and blossomed into the service that today's customer's love(d).

"By focusing on a narrower set of problems, it made engineering much more productive," Randolph wrote. "It made QA testing simpler. It made metrics more intuitive. And it paved the way for us to implement a process of rapid iteration and testing that ultimately ... led to the Queue, Unlimited Rentals, and No-Due-Dates-No-Late-Fees."

In other words, ignoring angry customers is sometimes the best way to move forward.

Today, we're looking at a similar situation to the one Randolph described. Netflix wants to leave its legacy DVD business behind, but risks losing customers by doing so. Only this time, Netflix is listening because the stakes are too high.

Netflix could have handled . It could have come up with a more attractive name for its spin-off service than Qwikster. It shouldn't have announced the split while customers were still seething over its price hikes. It should have pacified customers by including some interoperability between DVD and streaming queues--at least, for a little while. But scrapping the spin-off entirely is a mistake that could result in a less attractive streaming service down the road.