[vox-tech] Netflix

[Chanoch (Ken) Bloom]

On Tue, 2011-03-08 at 12:28 -0800, jim wrote:
> how do you know online petitions are not worth...? 
>     if i were in charge of a company or department, i'd 
> make sure y group was attentive to incoming electronic 
> info. i'd at least try to ensure that the filters were 
> sufficiently granular and produced useful statistics. 
>     it's a question: do you have info or are you jaded 
> or some such? 

I'm jaded. But seriously online positions are a perfect example of
slacktivism -- all someone needs to do to sign it is spend a couple
minutes of their time and go on the way. Someone may come along later
and present this petition to the company in question, but most likely
the CEO will (a) only waste a couple minutes of his time looking at it
and (b) have no idea whether this is a lot of people. But I suspect a
lot of these petitions never make it to the decision makers.

If you want Netflix on Linux, why not write your own letter to someone
in the support staff asking for help (as though you assume it should
work). That forces someone in the company to respond and makes them take
some time talking about it. And by continuing a conversation for as long
as you canm it makes it clear that you're interested enough to put in
some effort.

But really, you often need someone with leverage to go talk to them. If
Mark Shuttleworth thought that being able to watch Netflix on Linux was
important for his business, and could try to make an appointment with
the CEO of netflix, and address them personally that would make a big
impact. Likewise, someone who's a principal developer in a Linux video
app could also make the case. But he has do discuss why DRM problems are
non-issues (or unlikely issues).

--Ken