As a Netflix customer I applaud their 180 turnaround on their Qwikster plans. It doesn't matter to me if their flip-flop makes them seem a little scatterbrained, because the decision to keep both services bundled together makes the most sense.

Perhaps they realized that if they spin off their DVD business that there would be blood in the water and the likes of Amazon Prime and Blockbuster would feast at their expense. While I do think that online streaming is preferable to DVDs-by-mail, the fact is that there isn't enough online content available for streaming and the DVDs nicely fill in the gaps and I honestly don't think DVDs-by-mail will die off as quickly as they first thought.

It makes sense to keep DVDs-by-mail until their online streaming selection is much more broad, diverse, and containing a lot more quality content.

Near-universal consensus has it that they didn't know what they were doing when they decided to split off Qwikster.

Better to admit now that they didn't know what they were doing, than to keep doing something wrong for fear of admitting to a past mistake.

If the split was a mistake, then any embarrassment about correcting it now will be orders of magnitude less expensive to them than failing to correct it.

That was my first reaction too, but this was really a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation for Netflix. People were pissed at the change, and changing it back makes Netflix look bad. So, might as well take the option that users prefer.