Simply because doing some research will have yield the same results without a public embarassment! Netflix is quite a big player in user focus group and testing

Simply because doing some research will have yield the same results without a public embarassment! Netflix is quite a big player in user focus group and testing different scenario before launching new features, but in this case: total FAIL. Netflix constantly do major A/B testing on their web site to see if any minor changes had impact on their users. They even have a conference room for getting user focus group together and watch folks going over some new Netflix features... Looks like none of that experience was used in the Qwikster case.