
Bob Iger, the man who animated Disney - quickfox
https://www.newstatesman.com/robert-iger-disney-ceo-ride-lifetime-autobiography-review
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madrox
I worked at Disney for many years. Fun fact: Disney has no CTO...just EVPs per
division. This is, in part, because Iger considers himself the CTO Of Disney.
That may seem funny to HN, because you’ll never hear him say anything about
Kubernetes or Cloud, but he’s made some pretty big technology bets in his
tenure that have delivered on Disney’s goals. Disney+ is actually the product
of a 2B acquisition of BAMTech. Disney also has a pretty huge chunk of high
end graphics tech thanks to investments in ILM, Pixar, and Animation. XLab is
another source of tech innovation.

Disney doesn’t tend to get enough credit as a tech company because to them
tech takes a back seat to entertainment in the public eye. That can be
frustrating and humbling as an engineer, at times, but its definitely
enlightening.

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Razengan
> _Disney doesn’t tend to get enough credit as a tech company because to them
> tech takes a back seat to entertainment in the public eye. That can be
> frustrating and humbling as an engineer, at times, but its definitely
> enlightening._

Weren't Bob Iger and Steve Jobs close or at least friends?

That kind of echoes Jobs' sentiment about "technology alone is not enough —
it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that
yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

Tech to these guys is a means to a goal.

~~~
tboughen
Bob Iger and Steve Jobs were very close friends. I heard an interview of Bob
Iger on BBC Radio 4 this afternoon where he spoke at length about his
friendship with Steve Jobs
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b0c9#play](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b0c9#play)

~~~
Austin_Conlon
Steve Jobs on storytelling and Disney's monopoly on the business:
[https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-stories-about-
people...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-stories-about-people-
randomly-or-non-randomly-meeting-Steve-Jobs/answer/Tomas-Higbey)

~~~
aprdm
That was when Steve and the CEO before Bob didn't get together... Steve did
sell Pixar to Disney after all.

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aprdm
I highly recommend his recent book! Had no idea how close he was to Steve Jobs
and it is incredible how Bob/Steve changed Disney.

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naringas
also about Iger's Disney [https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to-
break-up-disn...](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-
disney-part)

~~~
aidenn0
Nice article. One point:

> Disney will have to lose money it could otherwise make in order to
> differentiate its streaming service.

> Such a move cuts against much industrial organizational economic theory.
> Theorists posit that corporations like Disney tend not to intentionally lose
> money just to acquire market power, because foregoing revenue is not,
> apparently, rational. This theory is nonsense. After all, if Disney is
> willing to tolerate losses just to drive competitors out of business, then
> vertical foreclosure is deeply problematic, and perhaps illegal.

The reason it's not typically rational is that you have no guarantee of being
able to maintain your monopoly once you've cornered the market. As soon as you
raise prices to recoup your losses, competitors will come out of the woodwork.
This is not the case with media companies though, because they have a
government enforced 95 year monopoly on their content.

If Disney were to put Netflix out of business, buy Netflix's content, and then
raise their Disney+ service price, I cannot legally setup a competing service
to stream Netflix's old content.

TL;DR: The economic theory that says predatory pricing is usually irrational
assumes fungible goods, but media is not fungible.

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echelon
> media is not fungible.

It could be. Imagine a world where movies don't cost millions of dollars to
make.

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aidenn0
It's not about costs. Regardless of budget, I can't make a star wars movie.

~~~
echelon
Imagine a world where you _could_.

It's a tooling problem more than a budget one.

In fifty years I think we'll be telling the machines what stories we want to
experience. But between now and that dreamy future, there are intermediate
points along the path that empower individual or small groups of creatives to
lift mountains - I think of it much in the same way as languages and tools and
libraries make it so we don't have to string together vacuum tubes to solve
our problems. Think about the kinds of problems filmmakers face: writing a
cohesive narrative, finding and lighting a scene, editing massive amounts of
video. It's all just a problem of tooling.

When there is a way that lets you or anyone with an ounce of creativity turn
their dreams into polished, watchable content, it will democratize
storytelling.

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apatters
The tools and even the content itself don't really seem to be the fulcrum of a
content business. As thousands of derivativr pop songs and mediocre AAA video
games attest, it's all about distribution. Those are industries where the
tools are already democratized and it doesn't matter. Building, acquiring,
partnering with, monopolizing the largest distribution channels wins you the
revenue war.

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woander
Why is it that every post about a company ( Disney today, Stripe yesterday,
Microsoft, Gitlab, Bloomberg, , etc ), the top comment is always a PR-style
praise of the company?

It's always "I used to work at and so and so is great" or "I know someone who
worked at and so and so is great".

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bequestry
Seen anything about china/hong kong in the news lately? Seen a lot anout pro
blizzard/pro disney?

