Netflix's Reed Hastings Is No Steve Jobs

Netflix and Apple share price moves brought current in this update.

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Netflix(NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings apparently didn't spend enough time last weekend reading about Apple's(AAPL) late co-founder and former CEO, Steve Jobs, and his work as a technology innovator.

Fawning over Jobs, who died Wednesday, reached a peak yesterday. There were countless tributes to Jobs, including one that called him a "secular prophet" and another the "high priest" of the Apple religion.

CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings

The decision today by Netflix to qwikly dispatch its Qwikster spinoff, though, best highlights why Jobs was such an effective leader at Apple. Consumers demanded Blu-ray players in Apple computers, so instead Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air laptop computer with no DVD drive whatsoever. He maintained that the push to digital delivery was a major trend to be followed, not ignored. That's one key reason why digital sales of music have gone through the roof, eclipsing CD sales.

Brazenly, Jobs flat-out refused to allow Adobe(ADBE) Flash to run on iOS devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Despite the public heat, Jobs repeatedly said Flash slowed down the operating system too much, and instead pushed for developers to use HTML5. Whether the decision was right or wrong, Jobs stuck to his belief that Flash would be poorly executed on Apple's devices.

Hastings, though, has shown he can't stick to a strategic decision. Instead, he looks more like a flip-flopper whose backtracking would make some GOP presidential hopefuls blush. His own words can be used against him.

"There is a difference between moving quickly -- which Netflix has done very well for years -- and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case," Hastings said in a statement today. That is quite a turnaround from only a month ago, when Hastings blogged on Netflix site that "companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly."

Investors are showing where their faith lies. Netflix shares retreated after the initial euphoria, falling from a session high of $128.50 to a low of $115.60. Apple, on the other hand, rose 4% to $384.57.

To borrow a term from the Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs, Hastings now thinks he put Netflix into ludicrous speed too early. In reality, though, we're probably more likely to call that Apple speed.

-- Written by Robert Holmes in Boston.

>To contact the writer of this article, click here: Robert Holmes.

>To follow Robert Holmes on Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/RobTheStreet.

>To submit a news tip, send an email to: [e-mail].

>To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints