[cookiecaper]

It's a terrible move because you're splitting the business on an irrelevant implementation detail. There is one thing at the root of all this from a customer's perspective: watching TV and movies. Netflix as a unified DVD and streaming solution facilitated this well for reasons already mentioned; you could stream if streaming was available and desirable under the circumstances, but you could wait for the DVD if you had a good reason to do so, and these services both cooperated to enhance the customer's single experience and goal of watching movies.

There really is no reason this should not have been a significant internal restructuring offering the necessary resources to both divisions instead of a major public split like this. It's simply not a customer-facing issue. Now, as DVD becomes less and less relevant, Qwikster is doomed to an eventual shutdown, its users will lose their data (recommendations, rental history, reviews, etc) and/or Netflix will have to merge it back in to its database anyway, and there are just a myriad of other inconveniences from the user side.

Essentially, you broke something that was working well for its customers for the convenience of internal management and politicking.