TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Austin Carr has a terrific look at Netflix’s Project Griffin, a set-top box the company finished and nearly released in 2007. But they didn’t:

It was December 2007, and the device was just weeks away from launching. Yet after all the years and resources and talent invested in the project (a team of roughly 20 had been working on it around the clock, from ironing out the industrial design and user interface to taking trips to Foxconn to finalize production details), Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was having serious second thoughts. The problem? Hastings realized that if Netflix shipped its own hardware, it would complicate potential partnerships with other hardware makers. “Reed said to me one day, ‘I want to be able to call Steve Jobs and talk to him about putting Netflix on Apple TV,’” recalls one high-level source. “‘But if I’m making my own hardware, Steve’s not going to take my call.’”

Smart decision that, at the time, might not have seemed quite so obvious. The company was finishing up advertisements for the product’s launch—it was finished, and Hastings decided to kill it at the last second. He decided to kill a product that could have opened up Netflix’s future.

But, of course, it could also endanger their future, as Hastings saw. In retrospect, it’s an obvious decision. At the time, not so much; not only would it have seemed risky at the time to kill a product that could turn Netflix into a media streaming company rather than a DVD rental company, but it also meant killing the hard work of many people in the organization.

This is a good reminder of why, for business, it’s important not to be sentimental or fear being wrong. The right choice is the right choice, and Hastings made it.