The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
Published 7 Sep 2020

Despite our growth, Blockbuster was still a hundred times larger than we were ($5 billion versus $50 million). Moreover, Blockbuster was owned by Viacom, which at that time was the most valuable media company in the world. Yet, by 2010, Blockbuster had declared bankruptcy. By 2019, only a single Blockbuster video store remained, in Bend, Oregon. Blockbuster had been unable to adapt from DVD rental to streaming. The year 2019 was also noteworthy for Netflix. Our film Roma was nominated for best picture and won three Oscars, a great achievement for the director Alfonso Cuarón, which underscored the transformation of Netflix into a full-fledged entertainment company.

The Soul of Wealth
by Daniel Crosby
Published 19 Sep 2024

In a twist of painful irony, Blockbuster had the chance to buy out Netflix for just $50 million, but its management team laughed Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph out of the room.31 The cost of hubris in that instance was about $200 billion (the current market cap of the streaming giant). Today, there remains a lone Blockbuster store in Bend, Oregon and—it gets better—it was the feature of a 2022 Netflix special. Perhaps the ultimate story of solving the wrong problem was borne out by BlackBerry. To its credit, the mobile phone firm was a pioneer in its market. BlackBerry’s physical keyboard was loved by businesspeople and its secure email capabilities made working on-the-go a thing before smartphones truly went mainstream in the late 2000s.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

Over the past decade, consumers have read fewer physical newspapers and have been “cutting the cord” with cable, yet plenty of newspapers and cable subscriptions are still sold and will continue to be sold for decades to come. Similarly, fax machines, video rental stores, and dial-up internet feel like relics of the nineties, but people still send plenty of faxes, and, as of the time of this writing, in late 2018, there still exists a Blockbuster video store in Bend, Oregon, and more than a million people still use AOL dial-up! As Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) said, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” U.S. Newspaper Circulation Momentum is a model that can help you understand how things change. Momentum and inertia are related concepts.

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
by Marc Randolph
Published 16 Sep 2019

It introduced the concept of binge watching, and is a popular euphemism for getting laid. I know that the stock market is never an indicator of real value—but I can’t help but note that as of this writing, the little DVD-by-mail company that Blockbuster could have purchased for $50 million is now worth $150 billion. And guess where Blockbuster is? They’re down to one last store. It’s in Bend, Oregon. I keep thinking I’ll make a trip to pay my respects, but I haven’t found the time. I can’t take credit for all of Netflix’s successes in the years after I left. But even though many of the company’s initiatives took place after my watch, I think it’s clear that a lot of them have my fingerprints on them.