Chris

It’s all to do with commodisation. If your product becomes a commodity item, then it’s no longer possible to differentiate between yours and someone else’s. You don’t look at the stickers on the bananas in the supermarket because they’re all just bananas as far as you’re concerned. Microsoft was very good at this in the early 90s, when they captured all the brand awareness for Windows 95 amongst most of the emerging home PC user market, at the expense of the hardware manufacturers.

Netflix is worried about losing control of its brand, which in part it communicates to its users via its own user interface. When a user enjoys a show made by Netflix, Netflix wants the viewer to attribute all their appreciation to Netflix. That is somewhat harder to ensure if the viewer journey doesn’t start and end at the Netflix UI. If you begin from a common menu structure run by Google you risk users attributing appreciation to Google instead. That’s what they’re worried about.