Disney Arrogance

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

From Wiki:



I wonder if this is standard practice for large publicly-traded media corporations. i.e. screw the little guy who can't afford to fight back. Hey, it's just business.

No.
It's only standard practice for companies (big and small) without ethics.
(See above, re: Nightshade and Skyhorse.)

Some companies actually look out for their staff and suppliers.
Mind you, the list doesn't include Disney, Apple, and Google. Or many big tech companies from SiliValley.

It's a matter of corporate culture as set by the top guy.

[binaryhermit]

Is there such a thing as a business with ethics?

[DiapDealer]

Of course there is.

[Thasaidon]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Of course there is.

I agree, however it is unfortunate that ethics and business size often seem to be inversely proportional.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Thasaidon

I agree, however it is unfortunate that ethics and business size often seem to be inversely proportional.

Age also has an impact; once the company is successful and "professional" managers move in, often with little concern for the reputation or culture of the company, the things that made it successful go overboard.

Still, some companies manage to grow and hang on to their founding principles.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Some companies actually look out for their staff and suppliers.

Do you have some good examples? And maybe some stinkers too. Just curious.

[leebase]

I'm not shocked that a large company has shady business practices. Or any company for that matter. I am shocked that a company who's CORE BUSINESS is Intellectual Property that they wouldn't be honoring IP.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by leebase

I'm not shocked that a large company has shady business practices. Or any company for that matter. I am shocked that a company who's CORE BUSINESS is Intellectual Property that they wouldn't be honoring IP.

One rule for thee, not for me.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

Do you have some good examples? And maybe some stinkers too. Just curious.

Stinkers it's easy. Look up "EA voted worst company", "UbiSoft toxic environment", or :

https://digg.com/2017/marvel-cb-cebulski-yellowface

Note that I refered to emp!oyees and suppliers.

On the "kinder, gentler" (self-interest) side, there's this:
https://www.oncommonground-digital.o...ticleId1448823

2017, Facebook revealed that it will build a village across from its campus in Menlo Park that will include 1,500 residences, a walkable retail district, a grocery store, and a hotel for its employees. LinkedIn has contributed $10 million to HTSV’s TECH fund to aid with housing for its employees in Sunnyvale.

Google is going big with its plans for employer-assisted housing (EAH) at many of its facilities throughout North America, because of lessons learned in Silicon Valley at Mountain View, where its 750,000-square-foot headquarters employs about 20,000 people, but fewer than 5,000 housing units were built between 2003 and 2014.

Google recently won city approval to construct a campus with nearly 10,000 housing units, offices, shops, businesses, and a public park in the North Bayshore area of Mountain View. Approximately 20 percent of the housing will be priced at below-market rate because of Google’s significant investment in Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs), a federal loan program established in 1986 which has helped finance over 2.4 million affordable housing units across the United States.

“I think that a lot of people enjoyed the suburban lifestyle that many of our communities have and they wanted to preserve that,” Pat Showalter, Mountain View’s mayor at the time told the San Francisco Chronicle. “They were fearful that densifying and providing more dense housing would really create problems for their communities. What’s important is that those communities are designed properly and we have the infrastructure that supports that dense design.”

“Company towns” of the 21st Century will have to be a much different animal than those of past times, driven by different needs. “The fact that companies that design software and build algorithms for a living are having to build housing is really an indicator of the failure of our traditional housing supply model,” Matt Regan, senior vice president of government relations for the Bay Area Council, told the San Francisco Chronicle. How the building industry responds, and what financial support it can hope for, will have a dramatic effect on EAH programs in industries requiring a skilled labor force that can be satisfied and feel invested in the community where they live and work.

Skilled Employee Housing
But while Silicon Valley might be one of the neediest areas for employee housing, it certainly isn’t the only one. Cities across the country are struggling to house skilled employees for other industries, such as university and medical facility faculty and staff.

The University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland is the cultural hub of the city, known as “Ohio’s most spectacular square mile.” It’s home to museums, restaurants, parks and other urban amenities. It’s also home to universities and medical research facilities that require skilled faculty and staff, such as Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic Main Campus, a VA hospital and University Hospitals.

Cleveland’s University Circle neighborhood lacks affordable housing for faculty and staff.

What the area lacks, however, is sufficient affordable housing for the faculty and staff. Fortunately, there is Greater Circle Living, which is a program that works with local businesses and qualified employees to provide up to $30,000 in forgivable loans and other assistance. It’s a public-private (P2) partnership whose motto is “An incentive to live near work.”

Companies can benefit by developing a real estate portfolio to supplement their corporate assets.

“It’s wonderful to live close to where you work. And it’s a self-supporting thing. The more people who live in an area, the more businesses that follow, and it becomes a thriving center,” explained Andrew, an employee from Case Western Reserve University.

Others have given similar testimonials. “I live 2.9 miles from work. I like to say I roll out of bed and into work. I’ve ridden my bike to work and I could walk to work. It’s convenient and it saves on gas, too.” said an employee from Cleveland Clinic.

With some professions, it’s not just a matter of convenience. Dr. Karthick has this perspective, “I love the proximity to work. I’m three minutes from Cleveland Clinic. I’m on call a lot so I need to be at work quickly. I didn’t want a long drive.”

Getting direct financial support from businesses that require a skilled labor force is not necessarily corporate philanthropy, it’s investing in their future. Using those funds to leverage available public funding and services is a multiplier that can have significant results.

If you look at the companies least impacted by the WFH regimes, you'll find that most of them already offered employees flextime and work from home options.

Others pay for employee schooling even if its not in a profession they employ.
On-site child care is also common.

It's all self-defense; happy empoyees are more productive and replacing a trained employee costs about a year and a half worth of salary.

There is one fast food company, the fastest growing one in the country, is notorious for its working conditions, employee friendly policies, and closing on sundays to ensure everybody has the same day off.


Or, Try this one for a shocker:

https://www.theverge.com/21611412/mi...ecoder-podcast

They don't come much bigger.

Then moving on to Satya [Nadella], he’s just such an empathetic leader, somebody who’s connected to feelings and motivations. Like when he says, we’re here to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, which is the mission statement of the company, he truly believes that. It’s amazing to see him talk about that in our leadership meetings like, “Okay, how is this going to touch 7 billion people on the planet?”

When you’re a company with the market cap that we have and the capacity that we have, that’s the scale we should be working at. Satya just raises us to that every moment. You see us standing up for climate change, you see us stand up for representation in our senior ranks and making public statements that, frankly, we don’t exactly know how we’re going to achieve. There’s no math today that says how we get to all of our carbon-neutral and carbon-negative goals, but being bold to stand up and be accounted for in the public eye, I think, is just an incredibly, incredibly a great learning opportunity for me and I value it.

Game Pass relies on third-party content. I want it to be that way. I want our third parties to have success. One of the things, going back to previous CEOs, Bill always had this good point of view that you’re not really a platform until other developers make more on your platform than you do. That’s one of the fundamental definitions of a platform. I think it’s very smart to look that way. I think about Game Pass as a platform. It’s not just a subscription on a platform.

I want third parties to see the distribution and monetization capability of Game Pass as something that is accretive to their business and important to them.

Again, self-interest.
If you look at all the successful distribution systems, like Windows, Playstation, or Steam or, yes, Amazon, third parties make a lot more money than the platform holder. One reason the WiiU was a failure because during the GameCube and Wii eras, Nintendo games left little room for third parties so they got few if any crossplstform games.
Than changed with the SWITCH.

You’ve got a business that’s growing and you want to grow as fast as you can. You want to grow in a healthy way. You’re either going to grow by making more from the customers that you have now, or finding new customers.

I’d say in the console space over the last four or five years, most of the growth that the industry has realized has been growth per user, not growing the number of console users that are out there. It’s actually been a fairly fixed number over the last decade.

Which for us, [people] that love console gaming like we do, should be a sign of, hey, we don’t want to be about raising the price on retail products because you have a fixed number of customers and you just want to figure out “how do I get 10 more bucks from them?” We want to think about how we bring more people into the gaming funnel, have more people experience this art form that we love. The pushback against [doing one console] was always, but we want to grow, we want to find new customers.

At a time when politicians are out for blood after the biggest tech company, Microsoft is the one going on without a posse after them. Part is that they're diversified wity 20 different billion dollar businesses, but part of it is they've gone back to basics and the new boss is focused on a different way to boost the bottom line.

What makes the Disney/Foster fiasco such a mess is that it is stupid.
The stakes are peanuts to Disney but important to the authors getting shafted.

Whoever is behind it needs to get fired for the sheer stupidity of it.
Even companies as ethically challenged as Google and facebook know it isn't worth it to mistreat employees. Customers you can get away with abusing but not employees and suppliers. Sooner or later it'll bite them.

Not every company gets it (*cough*Audible*cough*) but a lot do and some can even afford it.

[Sarmat89]

Alan doesn't have a case: the book he wrote is LucasFilms property, and not his.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Alan doesn't have a case: the book he wrote is LucasFilms property, and not his.

It's not a property dispute. The price Lucasfilm paid him included the contractual obligation to pay him the agreed upon royalties. Disney now says they acquired Lucasfilm's assets, but not its obligations. Unlike your earlier rant in another thread, this really IS stealing.

[Pajamaman]

@fjtorres
Thanks for the info.

[cfrizz]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

From Wiki:



I wonder if this is standard practice for large publicly-traded media corporations. i.e. screw the little guy who can't afford to fight back. Hey, it's just business.

It is the standard practice of every major corporation to screw over the little guy! But every now and again the little guy wins.

https://www.audioholics.com/news/blu...s-strikes-back

https://www.psaudio.com/pauls-posts/death-of-a-monster/



The case never went anywhere and the negative press against Monster was so bad that I have no doubt it cost them finanacially.

Word traveled all over the internet to every audio website in existence, with the word being Don't buy Monster cables, people listened and complied. Big box stores listened and complied, the few audio stores listened and complied. Score one for the little guy!!!

If Monster can fall, so can Disney, it will just take them messing with the wrong person to get the ball rolling.

[binaryhermit]

I think Disney is in a better position to handle negative press.

Especially since they own major media markets and have a product that's more desirable than Monster cable.

Like, one of many cheaper and (likely, at least for digital) at worst comparable quality alternatives are more or less substitutable.

Whereas many people can't directly substitute content with IP not owned by Disney for Mickey Mouse and get similar results. Like, you can't necessarily want Star Wars and go with Star Trek and get the desired result.

[cfrizz]

Bullying, greed, and negative press combined is a powerful combination. There have been plenty of giants that we thought would go on forever are now just a footnote in history. It's not impossible, it just needs to hit the right note and people will find something new that offers them more without the negative connotations.