Marc Andreessen, online guru/Digg investor, has some interesting notions about the timing of the WGA strike. You can see the full post at his site, but here's a few highlights edited for length:
So imagine you're a major media mogul.
You're faced with a massive, once-in-a-lifetime shift in mainstream consumer behavior from traditional mass media, including film and television, to new activities that you do not control: the Internet, social networking, user-generated content, mobile services, video games. Many of your current lifeblood properties are not growing anymore or are in outright decline, and you don't own enough of the vital new properties to offset that, nor are you certain how you would make money with the new properties even if you did own them. And the consumers you rely upon for revenue are so frustrated with your company's inability to supply them with what they want, when they want it, that digital piracy of your content has become mainstream and socially acceptable behavior practically overnight, and all of your efforts to stop it seem to only make it worse.
Your company was founded 50 or 80 or 100 or 150 years ago by different people in a different time, and the overwhelming majority of your people now -- smart and well-meaning managers and bureaucrats, but still managers and bureaucrats -- have to be retrained and reoriented toward entrepreneurial thinking in a viciously dynamic and startlingly fast-changing world not of your, or their, creation.
Is this really the right time to pick a fight with the writers over royalties from DVD and Internet sales, leading to an industry-wide shutdown and massive economic pain for all sides in the world of traditional scripted film and television content?
Really?
Suicide by Strike [Blog.pmarca.com]
-- Dana Harris
I feel that's a major problem in every aspect of the industry: they're all controlled by dinosaurs in a digital age. They need to make way for evolution.
Posted by: Allen | November 09, 2007 at 09:40 AM