Gorgeous Arrogance

John Battelle nails it with his post on Viacom's acquisition strategy. They want to get into the Internet now (seems a tad late, no?), but they aren't going to buy Yahoo! or Google.

John calls it the gorgeous arrogance of media companies.

Well everyday I wake up and applaud the gorgeous arrogance of all big companies.

Because that is what great entreprenuers feed on.

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Posted March 22, 2005 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Years ago I was in the Restaurant business. I would buy a place that just went out of business, work my behind to get it back in shape. My degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management helped me a wee bit.

After 6 months I would place it with the brokers and sell it. When prospective buyers came in, I would put on my plainest face and act as if it was all a gift from God. The buyers would look at me, say if this simpleton can do XXX, I can blow that away.
I love arrogant people, they bought me my house. It is not just the big companies that fall into that trap.

Posted by: Tom | Mar 22, 2005 8:21:37 PM

Well, it may be what great entrepreneurs feed one, but one shouldn't forget that the wider choice that then is on offer is usually more than offset by an increasingly dumb and undiscerning market.

That's the whole purpose of the capitalist system - and the so-called "democracy", I may add: quantity over quality; manipulation over education; domination over participation.

Look at what Joseph Chilton Pearce said in 1999 already - an extract from the Journal of Family Life magazine:

Look into Ralph Nader and Linda Coco's new book on the corporate exploitation of children. It's a bomb shell. For instance, when Ralph Nader approached Bob Pittman, who invented MTV, and asked him if he realized the profound influence they were having on fourteen year olds, the guy leaned back and said, "Ralph, we don't influence fourteen-year-olds, we own them". Today there are actually entrepreneurs in the marketplace selling programs to corporations detailing how to exploit the child mind! In other words, we are totally set up right now as a consumer society, and changing that fact would literally threaten our economy.

The entire article on http://www.inspiredmind.com

Then The Register ran an item (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/21/how_dumb_kids/) how computers make kids dumb.

Then a teacher friend of mine living in Philly said to me last night: "i had one student tell me the other week (and you'll be horrified at this) that he plays online video FPS (first person shooter) games an average of 70 hours -- that's a 7 and a 0 -- a week!"

So, I think your assumption is fatally flawed that those great entrepreneurs actually make a real -positive- difference in the market and therefore influence society to a large extent. We've gone beyond this being possible. Otherwise IE's market share would be unter 5%, nobody would watch MTV, half the US population wouldn't be overweight or obese, and GW Bush wouldn't have been reelected. In fact, the US wouldn't be on its way down to a Fascist state now, and the 9/11 attacks are also rather unlikely to have happened.

It's all connected, and so far it doesn't look very pretty. It's changing slowly as more and more people "see the light", but it may - and probably will - be too late for the majority. Not even great entrepreneurs will change that. You'd have to destroy the media conglomerates that have been feeding us lies and half-truths for decades first, which in the honourable way means bleeding them dry by simply not using their product. But then again, IE still has a 60-70% market share and MTV is wildly successful, plus the big media conglomerates still wield an insane amount of power.

I rest my case.

Helmar

Posted by: Helmar | Mar 23, 2005 2:53:55 AM

Forgot this: worse still, one day we will have to explain to our children why we didn't do anything about it, but by and large participated in and even profited from this madness.

Think about that - it may just affect your next investment decision or your next gadget purchase.

Posted by: Helmar | Mar 23, 2005 2:58:17 AM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC