2 Comments

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  Anonymous August 8, 2007 7:14 pm

  Osama, is that you??
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  Steve H August 9, 2007 12:47 am

  Who is the most powerful force in media entertainment and technology?

  Looking at the choices one by one, let’s see….

  Saying Jeff Bezos is powerful is like saying Meg Whitman is powerful. Both of them preside over important Internet properties that created powerful new business models (and got rich from them). But that doesn’t make them the most powerful players in the media.

  I say the same for Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Google may have unleashed an incredible search-driven advertising machine that’s the raison d’etre for all of the company’s other businesses (YouTube included) but again, that doesn’t make them the most important player in the media.

  As for Satoru Iwata, same, except Nintendo changed the face of gaming, not the face of the media.

  That leaves Murdoch and Jobs.

  I think the metaphor of “black and white” is very useful here.

  The forces that Murdoch channels are as black as the night, as black as crude oil, the personification of evil. They will continue to do no good in the world.

  Disney begat Snow White but remember the old adage “the Mouse has fangs.” But that’s Eisner’s Disney, not Jobs’ Disney (as Disney’s biggest stockholder). You don’t hear much about Apple being evil. Just a closed society. I would be too, if I held some of the world’s most coveted intellectual property. Apple has changed the music business by partnering with it. It changed the publishing business 20-plus years ago. It changed movie production. It owns the media player category. It is king of human factors engineering.

  If Jobs is Luke, Murdoch is Darth Vader. They are equally powerful and maybe best seen as opposing forces of good and evil. As ambassadors, respectively, of creativity and destruction.

  But in the end, I believe that humanity is basically good, which is why I chose Steve Jobs.