How Sony and Disney have influenced Apple

I have always been fascinated by Steve Jobs’ extreme interest in Sony and Disney. One of the first times I talked to Jobs in the early 1980s, he told me of his interest in Sony’s business as well as how Disney emphasized art and technology to build their company. We know that Jobs was especially interested in how Sony’s co-founder and CEO at the time, Akio Morita, thought about technology and software. With Disney, he admired their integration of art, entertainment and the role technology played in building Disney’s brand and business.

As I look at Apple’s current strategy, I see Sony and Disney’s influence still on Apple today.

I had the privilege of interviewing Akio Morita a few months before he left the role of CEO of Sony and retired. At the time, he had just acquired Guber-Peters Entertainment and Columbia Pictures Entertainment in 1989. Up until that time, Sony was known mainly as a hardware company. So I asked him why he bought a television and movie studio. He told me that “movies are just software.” By that time he had already acquired CBS Records Group, and he clearly had a vision that encompassed the role music, TV and movies would have on his hardware business.

He already had the Sony Walkman on the market and most likely had a vision of some type of handheld video player in mind with these newer acquisitions.

I believe that Jobs’ interest in Sony carried over to when he returned to Apple and he went to school on Morita’s vision when he introduced the iPod and eventually iTunes. Although Morita and Sony never put a service program in place, Jobs took their underlining hardware and software ideas and created the service layer of iTunes to round out Apple’s first integrated program of hardware, software, and services.

Jobs also deeply admired Walt Disney. He looked closely at Disney’s integration of art, entertainment and technology and, more importantly, the character of Walt Disney himself. Disney’s character drove him to focus on the family, and he determined to bring his customers a world and environment that was relatively protected from content that would not be family friendly. Consequently, Disney is considered one of the safest and family-friendly companies in the world and their theme parks, movies, and TV shows constantly reflect this theme.

Over the years, Apple seems to have stayed much closer to Morita’s vision of the integration of hardware and software and Disney’s family-friendly model when it comes to their underlying business strategies and practices. Apple’s strict screening of content that is allowed on their site and application stores, as well as their position on privacy, has given them a Disney like glow in the eyes of their customers.

I had been thinking about how Apple is perceived by mainstream America and other regions around the world, and the Disney like view kept coming up in my thinking. I recently read a piece by Benedict Evans, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who wrote a great piece that reflects this idea- Here is his take on this subject:

The old Apple promise was that you don’t have to worry if the tech works. The new promise is you don’t have to worry if the tech is scamming you.

I think this runs across all of the stuff they announced last week. Curated magazine articles with no fake news, scammy ads or data gathering. Curated games for you/your kid with no loot boxes or pay-to-win. A credit card that’s secure, with no hidden fees and weird points…

And though the TV announcement seemed really vague from a news/analysis perspective, it was pretty clear for brand messaging — Spielberg and Oprah, not Tarantino.

The old computer problems were about how it functions, and Apple removed (or hid) complexity. It all just worked. But (some of) the new computer problems are several levels further up in abstraction—privacy, trust, harmful content, weird charges, and scams. So just as Apple hid complexity in how your computer worked, now they want to solve complexity in how software/services/internet stuff works.
Another way to put it: they want to be the Disney of computers (in a good way). Disney stands for something—it has a clear brand promise. Apple was showing ambition to do that for News/games/credit cards, and TV.

In Jean Louis- Gasee’s Monday note, he also references Benedict Evan’s blog on Apple’s position on privacy and role as a safe haven for content and services-

“Evans contends that we’ve passed through the epoch when the focus was on making the technology work when we argued about defragging disks and tinkered with the internal working of devices. We have ascended to a new layer of interaction with technology where we worry about our privacy, our safety, our data, about the reliability of information:

“Apple has talked about privacy for a while, and sometimes curation, but these products make that much more tangible. The old Apple promise was that you don’t have to worry if the tech works. The new promise is you don’t have to worry if the tech is scamming you.”
In Evans’ analysis, trust is at the center of the relationship between Apple Services and its customers:
“Trusted, secure, private, no ads, no scams, no tricks you have to watch for (scammy in-app purchases in games, scammy/weird credit card charges) — it’s all curated.”

And Gasee asked the key question surrounding Apple’s customers’ acceptance of their overall position.
“Will customers appreciate, intellectually, this new relationship? Perhaps. But at the visceral level — the one that really counts — Apple’s new promise can work. This is a much better way to think (and emote) about the new Services than reducing the analysis to yet another ding to our pocketbooks.”

The more I look at the current Apple, and it is clear that they are very much more in control of their apps and services and filters all that passes through them to deliver a safe and private digital experience. Whether customers appreciate this or not is up to debate. But this seems to be the cornerstone of Apple today and, most likely, it will be the driver of their products and services in the future.