Greg Cohn's (Other) Blog

rafer:

parislemon:

Put this way, it sounds so simple. And actually, it should be this simple.

Unfortunately, this discounts the fact that Hollywood is run by people with their heads up their asses. Like this guy. It’s a fucked up nightmare of politics and greed. It’s amazing that anything good comes out of the system at all — it’s a testament to the true creative talent behind the films themselves. 

You can bet that Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and all the rest have tried to talk Hollywood into the system above. They’ve probably been doing it for a decade, if not longer. Instead, we get bullshit like UltraViolet — a giant middle finger to consumers.

Rafer sez:
Going to be reblogging you twice this morning (Wed SG time). 

What people in NorCal rarely appreciate is that the politics and greed are secondary at best. At an individual level, you’ve got a bunch of VPs and SVPs making a lot of cash every year, who have no noticeable equity in the businesses they run. They are mainly trying to keep the money flowing until they can retire and make it the next person’s problem. The mantra is ‘just three more years….’

You can generalize that mantra to the CEO’s, CFO’s, and boards of directors of most of these companies.   They’ll blame institutional investors and analysts, who are just doing their jobs — the real problem is no one wants to be the one to take the hit when markets get shrunk.  Rather than fight a younger man’s game that will re-price their market cap to new market realities, these guys try to squeeze the last drops of cash out of a familiar business model, even if they have to disingenuously fight the future, create “innovation” strategies that never exceed their institutional constraints, lie to congress, etc.   And that problem goes all the way to the top.