Although Ellis was curious about how Netflix ran its warehouses, he never thought about spying on his competitor or asking his employees to do so. Evangelist, on the other hand, was not quite so principled. He and Cooper recruited consumers in several cities to become Netflix subscribers for the purpose of dissecting the rival service in regular questionnaires sent by the marketing department. The Blockbuster Online team located most of Netflix’s distribution centers on the new consumer blog HackingNetflix.com and studied videos of its warehouse operations that they found on YouTube to figure
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