(CNN) -- It has been a rough couple of months for Netflix. The company that virtually defined online movie rentals was swamped by an unprecedented wave of customer ire two months ago when it raised prices for both its DVD mailing and online streaming services.





Netflix announced this week that it's splitting itself in two and rebranding its movies-by-mail service as "Qwikster." Based on initial online responses, this latest effort didn't make things much better. In fact, it seems to have, in the best cases, re-opened old wounds and, in the worst, given customers a whole new set of issues to be angry about.





"Reed, thanks for reminding me that I should go somewhere else for my DVD rentals. It was an insult enough that you raised the price on me last month, right in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression, but now instead of a sincere apology, all we get is excuses and a flimsy new name."





That's from a customer named Jonathan Ortega and it's one of more than 23,000 comments on a blog post by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explaining the latest changes. In the post, Hastings announced that the service that made Netflix famous, mailing DVDs in those iconic red wrappers, is being spun off and renamed Qwikster, while Web streaming video will continue to be called Netflix.





Not all the posts took the same flamethrower approach as Ortega's. But even some of the more evenhanded messages raised questions.





"While I appreciate the explanation (and e-mail) and I guess I understand your reasoning for doing this, the thing I'm having the hard time about is the separation of websites," wrote a user named Tellier Killaby Booth. "I don't understand why I will now have to go to two separate websites to manage my queues. The only reason that I have both services is because half the things I watch aren't available yet on streaming."





Chris Taylor of Mashable (a CNN content partner), questioned whether the spin-off of Qwikster was "the worst product launch since New Coke."





"As any marketer will tell you, there are some truly awful times to launch a new product -- like August, when few potential customers are paying attention, or January, when they're all shopped out from the holidays," Taylor wrote. "And then there's launching your new product in the 10th paragraph of an apology for some previous poor communication, as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings did late Sunday with Qwikster. ..."





Taylor, who says he has met and interviewed Hastings several times, calls him "one of the smartest and most amiable minds I've ever met." But he lays out a laundry list of problems, from the odd spelling of Qwikster to creating unnecessary confusion for customers who keep both streaming and DVD service.





And, yes ... that name. Plenty of folks were chiming in about that name -- from its lack of savvy (who's going to remember how to spell that?) to the fact the Twitter handle is already taken to simply mocking yet another random-seeming, oddly-spelled tech startup title.





"It is as though Hastings and the Netflix crew sat in a room and brainstormed the dumbest possible names they could think of and knew they were really onto something truly stupid when they came up with Qwikster ... ," said Huffington Post writer Jason Gilbert in what can only be described as an aggressively snarky post. "My first reaction, when I heard the news, was, "Hey Qwikster, 1991 called, it wants its radical new company name back."





The Internet wasn't unanimously down on Netflix's move, however.





Venture capitalist Mark Suster, who focuses on early stage tech companies, had a more positive take, calling Hastings' explanation "simply brilliant." (Worth noting: His company, GRP Partners, does not list Netflix as one of its investments.)





"[M]any short-termists will think it's a bad idea. Indeed, my Twitter stream tells me so,
how many customers commented? What is Netflix's DVD by mail going to be called? How many customers commented about the changes? what is Responses to latest changes ?
23,000 "Qwikster." 23,000 Netflix announced this week that it's splitting itself in two and rebranding its movies-by-mail service as "Qwikster."
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