Hi again, I hope you enjoyed the Sony case, and had a chance to dig into the issues. Here's an opportunity for me to debrief a bit, and maybe maybe elaborate and share a couple of points that I think are interesting. First of all there's a bunch of really good business lessons that come from this case. And so let's get that out of the way first, number one, how do you make or not make acquisitions? Clearly this was a place where there was minimal due diligence, they made a lot of mistakes, they paid a tremendous amount of money. They didn't really understand the market. We're not doing an entire video of course on making acquisitions, but those of you that have been involved, with acquisitions or those of you that may at some point be involved with acquisitions. It's pretty good to keep in mind, it's not an easy thing to do, and you may not know this, but the failure rate is actually quite high. And in that respect Sony is not unusual, but we see the reasons why. Number 2, the quality of leadership, and I'm thinking specifically here at, of Columbia pictures, and even Columbia music. Maybe it was Hollywood, and the whole scene, but the way they were operating the way they were behaving, it's the opposite of kind of your button down, formal, sophisticated management. We didn't see any of that we see of the pants, it was people doing whatever they thought what they were doing. And I don't know, maybe that was how Hollywood was, a couple of decades ago. Or maybe there's still, not maybe there's almost certainly still some of that today, but it's become much more sophisticated. Much more analytical and I think that's interesting. But when you go back and you see, in these cultural industries, how do you really know what's going to work in cultural industries like film? How do you know what movie to to to bet on? It's pretty interesting topic actually. Maybe AI will open up the door, as is happening right now in music to try to figure out what's the right movie, or what movie is likely to be successful. It's a tough thing to to know, but I'm a big sports fan like in baseball, where we have moneyball and the analytics that have really revolutionized baseball. And how people think about creating a team and managing a team, I'm managing a team on a game by game basis. I can't help but think that we're going to see, at least a bit more, maybe not completely, I'm definitely not completely. But a bit more work from AI and other analytical tools, artificial intelligence and other analytical tools. That might make the film industry and maybe cultural industries more generally, a bit more sophisticated. I mean I hope we never lose that kind of creative craziness, that's part of the cultural industries, but I don't think we're going to go back to the old days of Hollywood. And by the way on cultural differences one other point, Japan and the US, right? Talk about differences between two different corporate cultures, when you're making an acquisition. One of the places where there are big problems that occur, is this integration between two companies and in this case they were really different. And Sony actually left Columbia pictures all alone, to kind of figure it out on their own for a period of time until they finally had to intervene, because they were just bleeding money. So, there's a lot of issues here that I think are worth mentioning. But the main point I want to highlight, gets to really the beta versus VHS story at Sony. And how the lessons from that history actually biased their thinking, in a way that was just not logical, and hurt them in acquiring Columbia pictures. The Beta lesson was that you needed a family, which was a platform that others would rely on, and to get the family, you needed a series of alliances, with direct competitors to agree on a standard. Remember that's what happened with VHS and Sony's competitors in Japan. If VHS is the family or the platform, then video cassette tape manufacturers, would have to accommodate, the power of those VCR machines. It's kind of like of Amazon is your platform, for e commerce. Then, all of the companies that want to sell online, have to accommodate Amazon, and conform to their rules or maybe even a better example is the Apple app store. That's your platform, right? You have an app you gotta go and you want to sell it, you're going to the Apple app store, it's pretty hard to do it independently. And so you're dependent on the app store from Apple. Now aside from the regulatory scrutiny that goes with having such a dominant position, which is absolutely true for Apple and for Amazon. Strategically speaking, it's a very powerful place to be in the ecosystem, and you could make a lot of money because you're the gatekeeper. Now, note however, that in the case of Apple and Amazon, there's really no family in the way that Sony was thinking about it, right? Because our families and alliance of independent companies, that become the standard that everyone has to go through. In this case these are just single companies, that have incredible market power, that enables them to dictate the terms, but conceptually it's a similar type of thing. So, applying that lesson to Columbia pictures, is really where the problem occurred. Buying a movie studio, would not enable Sony to build a platform at all. I mean it's true that Sony would have more influence on say, high tech cameras, and other equipment that are used to make films. That was barely a small position for them back in those days and actually not that much in the 2020's either. Being a major studio does not a platform or family make, yet the memory of what happened in video cassettes dominated Sony's thinking, and it pushed them in this direction. The problem was it was the wrong direction, it was an emotional tag that made them reach the wrong conclusion, and come up with a strategy when it came to the movie business that didn't work. So Columbia on its own could never constitute that family logic, that alliance or that consortium. Or, taking the Apple or Amazon examples, that dominant gigantic company that could dictate terms to everyone else, they couldn't, yet Sony still made the deal, why? Because they were traumatized by Beta, and it created these powerful emotional tags, all about Beta. And it made them not want to repeat that same mistake, which for them was like the worst thing you can do. To have the best product, the best technology and not be able to support it. That was the problem, and when you start to look into and think about the emotional tags that are behind the decisions in the past, decisions. And by the way history as we talked about it as well, you start to get some insight into what Sony did wrong. And I think we get some insight into what we should be doing right, to try to avoid these types of problems.
