Netflix has taken some heat in recent months for their price hike—and, after raising prices, remaining silent about customer complaints.

So yesterday, when I (along with all other Netflix subscribers) received an e-mail from CEO Reed Hastings that begain with “I messed up”, I thought we were finally getting that mea culpa. Instead, after nine paragraphs of musing over the future of the DVD-by-mail business, Mr. Hastings then announced that the DVD-by-mail portion of Netflix was being spun off into a separate company to be named Qwikster.

Image via FoxNews.com

I personally am not affected by the price increase or the new Qwikster development (I’ve used Netflix solely for streaming for years), but the new brand still strikes me as monumentally stupid for a few reasons:

1.  The timing

Conventional wisdom says you don’t announce a major new product by burying it deep into an email sent at 4:00 am.

2.  The name

Disregarding the already much-laughed about Twitter problem (@Qwikster is currently occupied by a stoner named Jason Castillo), it’s hard to believe anyone thought Qwikster was actually a good name. It’s ripe for potential misspellings, doesn’t say anything about the Netflix brand, and in general just sounds very 90s.

3.  The overall idea

I’m having trouble understanding why Netflix thought the best way to appease its annoyed customers was to make things even more complicated—two separate websites, logins, and queues that won’t integrate with each other. This whole launch makes it seem like they’re eager to sell Qwikster at the first opportunity, thus leaving them free to concentrate on streaming (even saying in the e-mail  “DVD by mail may not last forever”).

What do you think? Will you keep Netflix and get a Qwikster account? Or are you done with Netflix forever?