hmmm

[dwenius]

So, what will Steve Jobs do to "fix" Disney? Anyone want to bet against him at this point? You have to assume the deal went down on Steve's terms (and his alone); he joins the board and becomes the biggest individual shareholder all in one fell swoop.

Comments

[kernelpanic.livejournal.com]

[cough] "one swell fwoop"

also:

<http://gentlemoose.livejournal.com/129790.html">Pixar buys Disney for -$7.4B"

[haineux.livejournal.com]

I have heard such amazing stories from people who worked for Disney, and worked at Disney.

eg.
When a contractor supplied carpeting for a 'backstage' area at a theme park, one of the 'imagineers' noticed that one of the colors of thread in the carpet was slightly off. So Disney sent back the entire shipment, and refused to pay anything, and threatened to sue if the mistake was not corrected quickly, because they 'could not' open the park until the carpet was right. Also threatened to sue if the carpet was resold, because the design is © Disney.

Now, any other corporation, either they'd decide not to care, or maybe they'd agree to take the carpet at a discount. But no, not Disney.

Unfortunately, apparently, they have a similar way of treating their own employees, which seems to have thoroughly eradicated any creative people from the place.

When Steve Jobs first returned to Apple, the first thing he did was to stop lots of projects, and fire lots of people. This had two effects: 1) getting rid of a lot of the people who ignored upper management's strategies, and 2) focus the company down to a small number of projects, which Steve was actively involved with, making sure that they were good.

It's easy to see how this could backfire at a company like Disney. It would not be bad news to have Jobs going around and getting rid of the beancounter idiots Eisner put in charge of stuff, but the risk comes when Jobs starts looking at creative projects. (Jobs shut down Apple's research labs.)

Luckily, I've heard that the top creatives at Pixar have been slid into high-level roles at Disney. Jobs trusts them, and lets them do creative stuff at Pixar. Maybe they can attract creative people BACK to Disney and give them enough room to put the spark back into things.

The biggest problem I see is that Apple is a pretty simple company. It sells computers, and makes software to power the computers. Now it also sells iPods, and makes software to power the iPods, but there's also this symbiotic music store thing. So there's three main businesses going on, and software is there to enable those businesses.

Disney, on the other hand, has a zillion different businesses going on at the same time. Media networks. Theme parks. Toys. All of these revolve around software -- movies -- but they are fundamentally different businesses that have conflicting priorities. Sony's having a lot of trouble with that.

It basically comes down to this: can he, in fact, work for the Disney CEO, or will he, like he did with Gil Amelio, pull the rug out and take over? If he does, can he handle that complicated a business?