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Apple, Pixar And Disney To Merge?
Master Bait sent in the freakiest merger rumor: Apple + Pixar + Disney, with Steve Jobs as the chairman... you can read more at the ever untrustworthy Drudge Report, so take this whole thing with a grain of salt the size of a Ford Taurus.
Cupertino 06/10/00 - Apple today announced that they will be merging with Disney in order to obtain disney's mouse technology. Having proven their success with 'Mickey' for over nearly 80 years, Apple are keen to revamp disney's mouse in a variety of different translucent colours in a bid to entice consumers to think differently.
So that explains where Steve Jobs got the idea for colorful iMacs - they're in technicolor!
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
I don't think there is any doubt that Disney would be very interested in buying Pixar, since Pixar gets a lot of cash from Disney for those animated features. Plus, Disney only has a 5-film contract with Pixar, and you would have to expect that a renewal, which they should want to start negotiating right about now, is also going to be extremely lucrative. So Pixar has no huge interest in being bought out...except that they do (see below).
As others have pointed out, however, Apple is an entirely different matter. I think some posters underestimate the possible value that Apple holds for Disney, but there is no doubt that Apple stockholders would do extremely well under certain buy-out scenarios, as could Pixar stockholders.
And here's why: Apple and Pixar stocks are both relatively cheap in the market when compared to Disney, at least when measured by P/E ratios; Disney (symbol DIS) has a P/E of over 80, while Apple and Pixar (symbolols AAPL and PIXR respectively, have P/Es stuck in the 25 range. In other words, a dollar of earnings by Disney is thought to be worth over three times as much as a dollar of earnings by Steve Jobs, Inc. This is, of course, a bit absurd, but it does point out that Disney is in a position to offer a very nice premium (say, 50%) over the market price for both companies and still make it look like a win. And, given all the extra earnings Disney could have by effectively voiding their contract with Pixar, this might still be quite an attractive deal, even if Disney has to swallow Apple, too. (And why Apple, too? Most likely because Jobs is CEO of both, hence responsible to the stockholders of both, and could probably get into trouble if he furthered the interests of one over the other in such a high-profile deal.)
But things get even more interesting when you realize one other thing, which is that Disney has a substantial retail presence that would seem almost ideal for selling the iMac. The world's cutest PC, playing the Toy Story 2 DVD-ROM in the Disney store. Oh, wanna buy the iMac? Just click on the "Buy an iMac" icon on the task bar and launch a browser to buy the iMac on line, hence no sales tax (and no need to carry inventory), even though you're standing right there in the store.
None of this means that the deal will happen of course, but the deal does have a larger degree of face plausibility than you'd expect from most stuff you drudge off the web...
Babar
Maybe Steve will slowly change the face of Mickey into his own image. Slowly changing all past episodes...so that our kids will never know the difference.
M...I...C..... See you really soon!
K...E...Y..... Why, Because we love you!
J...O...B....S....Mickey Jobs!
Mickey Jobs!
Rader
Indeed. There seems to be some simple harmonic motion in the cycle between this rumor and the rumor that Apple is about to go out of business -- the longer it's been since one rumor was published, the more likely it is for the other to pop up.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Here's a few one-liner thoughts.
1) Apple now has to buy its customers...
2) The new Disney Character iMacs, now even less ergonomic with character faced mice and classic Disney scenes preburnt into the monitor. Comes in such wonderful flavors as poison apple. Includes the World of Disney screensaver package and the MDE (Mickey Desktop Environment) for Apples newly renamed operating system Creationism.
3) Pixar will be dumping all of their high-end graphics machinery and customized code for a stack of iMac DV's, but customized for SMP...
4) The new Pixar desktop assistant, a jumping, mute desklamp that gestures help files and procedures to you in its cute and witty but speech free way of expressing itself. The ultimate in userfriendliness, as now computer users not only do not need to be computer literate, but they can also lack basic reading and speech skills entirely.
5) iMac Story, the touching story of a bunch of fruity flavored fishbowls, in a desparate attempt to save iMac blue from the clutch of Bill Gates.
Eh...
of course, the first series were 700 and 900. My bad :)
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
But the girl uses IRIX old 3d file manager to
navigate the system. To bad it wont work on newer
versions of IRIX since I cant run on our
O2's at school.. buhhh!!!
http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3 d_navigator.html
is the url for the software..
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Now we can see apples in more movies. Why are all computers in movies apples?
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I think that's about right. :-) But do note that Eisner is now 58 years old (I believe) while Jobs is only 45. Jobs waited 14 years (I think) to regain the CEO title at Apple, and, as long as he was given decently free reign over his corner of Disney, probably wouldn't be in any huge hurry to become CEO of Disney. Or, maybe he would, in which case the deal would never happen.
Babar
... calls the Drudge Report untrustworthy?
Now that's the pot calling the kettle black!
...Brittle, high-strung Steve Jobs introducing each Sunday episode of "The Wide World of Disney."
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
... I knew you could.
So why was this moderated to interesting?
Steve M
or should i say slashdot, slashdot, slashdot...
this little 'rumor' has been floating around for a long, long time - well, since 1997 or so. the speculation was there from the moment jobs stepped back into cupertino. that the G3/apple logo on the side of the blue G3s sported a distinctly mickey mouse-shaped hole didn't help things a bit.
this is - for those of you that are not familiar with, or do not read on a fairly regular basis, or are not (as i am) addicted to, the mac rumor web scene - pre-macworld-news-vacuum-speculation
disney doesn't want apple - apple is a hardware company with all kinds of actual inventory and an actual market to deal with, and not an entertainment company. if apple made action figures, maybe. also, apple doesn't want to be disney-fied. hell, they just got NeXT-ified, and things are still settling down from that. and besides, jobs would never stand for it.
that doesn't preclude disney from throwing a lot of money at apple to produce special disney editions of the imac and ibook - which is more likely - featuring various characters from disney films, or at the very least a nice kid-oriented game/software bundle.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Jobs would have to be CEO over Eisners very dead body. (Which of course would be cryo-froze and put up in the castle along side Walt).
Actually, I think you have it backwards. The reason why Apple nearly went under is that they had a plunging market share, a confusing product line-up, and a niche in an ecosystem where Microsoft seemed to be the unstoppable predator. Who is going to hand over much money for that? Not many people outside the computer industry itself, since Apple itself showed that you couldn't just bring in some soft drink king and build a successful hi-tech company with it.
These days, you have a growing, stylish, up-market computer and software film with close ties to the entertainment and video production industries as well as the closest possible tie-in to a major creator of animated features. Looks way more attractive, especially if the stock for that company trades at a way lower earnings multiple than most of its competition. Or than many of its potential acquirers.
Again, I don't put too much stock in this rumor given the personalities involved, but to claim that it makes no sense from a business perspective, given some of the other deals we've seen recently, is seriously mistaken.
Babar
Why the hell would Disney want Apple?
<RANT>Why the hell would Disney want the Anaheim Angels or the Anaheim Mighty Ducks? It's not just that the Angels, with all their talent, miss the playoffs year after year. IMHO a company like Disney has no business whatever owning a baseball, hockey, or any other sports team. I can see them owning ABC as a guaranteed market for its content. But ESPN is a considerable stretch. And baseball and hockey teams, for cryin' out loud? It's not like they're Ted Turner and they need them to fill air time on ABC.
So Disney taking over Apple makes as much sense as a number of other acquisitions they've spent money on in the last several years while Disneyland falls apart, which is to say none at all. </RANT>
Actually, though, the main reason I don't believe this merger rumor is that I can't see Michael Eisner giving up control of Disney under any circumstances that don't involve carting him out of his office feet first.
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
Must be that time of the year.
Lets see.. Wow! my watch lost almost 4 minutes, I'll have to get a new battery soon.
Rember last year when Disney was going to buy apple, or the year before that? This time apple is going to buy Disney?
Did anyone hear that Dell was going to buy Universal?
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
It could be accurate. Keep in mind it took 36 CPU-hours in order to render a frame. Perhaps they were rendered in parallel on separate machines/groups. With a bank of systems doing rendering, at 36 hours a frame, if there were a thousand machines/groups, that would drop your estimate to less than a full year.
Of course, an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of Macs with an infinite number of licences for rendering software could do the same thing, even if it took considerably more than said 961 years.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
*rolls eyes* See, it was a joke. Everyone knows Disney ain't in the castle...or epcot...or space mountain.
Let's think about this for a second.
This cyclical rumor keeps showing up despite the fact there is no factual basis for it. The only reason for assuming it in the first place is the hideously tenuous logical link that Steve Jobs, who is the [technically unpaid-- he gets a salary of $1 a year, plus some other slight "perks". The "perks" though, have included such things as millions of dollars of stock, and an airplane.] CEO of Apple, is also CEO of Pixar. That's it. The same person is working at both companies in a management position, and one of those two companies uses a third company for distribution and promotion purposes, so somehow in the warped minds of macosrumors it would follow that the three would merge.
Let's extend this logic a bit. For the next three or four minutes, for the purpose of argument, we will say that I AM A MAC RUMORS SITE, and therefore EVERYTHING I SAY IS TRUE because i NEVER CHECK MY SOURCES FOR ANY DEGREE OF ACCURACY.
Bruce Perens is an employee of Pixar. Bruce Perens is also the lead person behind the Debian open source linux distribution and head of the FSF. Whether the last two sentances are true or not is irrelivant; all i know is, like, Bruce Perens name was listed in the credits when i saw Toy Story 2, and, um, like, this r337 IRC d00d in #ircle said once that Bruce Perens ran Debian, and i'm a mac rumors site PH33R M3!!! So it must be right.
Because the same person is working at both Debian and Pixar in a coding postion, clearly the two are about to merge. This would clearly be logical, because they both involve penguins in some way, and because Debian has a [as of yet prerelease] PPC distribution in the works. So when disney buys apple, which they obviously will, Bruce Perens will make sure they buy the FSF as well because he's so attatched to it! Right? ISN"T THAT COOL!!!)@#(*!)(*!!!!!FSADFA
Please, please explain to me why the above is a lesser degree of bullshit than the rumors of apple, disney and pixar merging?
You can't, can you? The apple/disney rumors ARE just as idiotic. SO WHY DO YOU KEEP POSTING THIS STUFF ON THE SLASHDOT MAIN PAGE???
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~arobbins/imacs.jpg
Let's face it, these 3 companies do go hand in hand.
So do Time Warner and AOL. The merge-happy economy of the past few years needs to be checked out, lest we lose our ability to choose whom we buy products from.
From Schwabacher v. U.S., 334 U.S. 182: The appellants contend that their share in the merged company is to be measured by, or their remedies [ 334 U.S. 182 , 190] as dissenters are to be found in, state law, but that the federal agency is bound to determine and apply that law. The Commission on the other hand refuses either finally to foreclose or to allow these claims. It apparently leaves it open to the state courts, or to the parties by negotiation, to add to the surviving carrier's capital obligations which the Commission has found to be just and reasonable, others founded only in state law and as to which it has made no such findings.
The onus is on both the state and federal governments and the FTC to take a careful look at the slew of mergers currently going on. Nothing less than our precious capitalism is at stake.
Look, I'm as skeptical as the next guy about things that pop up in unreliable sources like the Drudge Report.
:)
But when rumours persist in the business world, particularly about mergers, they often have some element of truth to them.
Look at the recent separation between GM and GM class "H" (GMH) stocks. Rumours persisted for months about several companies, including AT&T, Sprint/MCI/WorldCom, and other companies buying GM in order to acquire Hughes Satellite. No, GM hasn't yet gotten bought out, but GM's behaviour regarding Hughes certainly has been consistent with these hostile takeover rumours. GM spun off the defense portion of Hughes, and kept Hughes Electronics. Then, GM split the links between GM and GMH stocks. Consequently, GM stocks fell and GMH skyrocketed. This behaviour is consistent with an attempt to prevent a buyout of GM.
Furthermore, for how many months were there rumours about the AOL/Netscape merger? For how many months did AOL and Netscape continually DENY that there were any talks. But it happened anyway.
I'm not saying that this proves anything about Apple/Pixar/Disney, but it goes to show that rumours of mergers often are at least partially true. Don't automatically dismiss it just because it is Drudge. Drudge has been right before, despite his sensationalist twist on things.
I wouldn't doubt that it could happen. Quit laughing...
My journal has hot
"We advise readers to be highly skeptical of this rumor."
Whatever happened to "This rumor is NOT true"? I am highly skeptical of their dismissal of the rumor.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Since then Apple has seen an amazing rebirth and return to amazing profitability. Even in the dark days this sort of crap was barely believable, but now days it is just absurd.
Why the hell would Disney want Apple? Disney I could see buying Pixar, but Apple? And why would Apple want Disney?
This just doesn't make any sense. I guess I'd chastize Slashdot for giving it enough credence to post at all.
MyopicProwls
My homepage
The laughter and the questioning of Drudge for trustworthiness was actually more directed at Slashdot as a whole, not to you in particular...
My journal has hot
For example http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/9902/disney-t o-buy-apple.shtml
Just feed Apple Disney merger into any search engine for many previous similar speculations, all equally uninformed ever since Jos took over the helm back at Apple.
I seem to recall slashdot fetaturing it before as well ... here it is
-- Oh Well
Well, it was actually PDI (through their association with Dreamworks) that did Antz. They have at least 2 pictures coming down the pipe: "Shrek" and "Tusker". Also Dreamworks has a multi-picture deal with Aardman (Chiecken Run), and they have at least 2 movies coming up, a version of the tortoise and the hare, and a Wallace and Gromit Movie. Fox has their association with Blue Sky Studios (they did 3D portion on Titan AE, originally it was going to be all 3D), and it wouldn't surprise me that they also got into it. Even ILM recently announced that they are trying to get into the 3D animated film business, and Digital Domain has always looked to expand and create content. As long as this houses develop and nurture their projects (instead of being mandated by the big studio), there should be healthy competition.
Not entirely: they had Apple Quadra 800s for the main GUI displays that 'Newman' from Seinfeld uses, and the "Security Camera" footage plays inside a regular ol' QuickTime movie window.
Now, if I had a TV capture card, I'd break out the laserdiscs and make some pics for all to enjoy, but I don't
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
From macnn.com this morning...
/.?
"Reigniting old rumors which have surfaced several times in the past few years, the latest edition of The Drudge Report speculates on an impending merger announcement between Pixar, Apple, and Disney. We advise readers to be highly skeptical of this rumor; AppleInsider first published an article more than 18 months ago that also suggested a possible Apple/Disney merger was in the works."
This has popped up so many times, I laughed so hard when Drudge put this up there.
And compared to Drudge.../. is hella better. When was the last time "the President's Talking Penis" was a 72 point headline on
Competition for what, Animated feature-length films? FOX and Warners both tried, and failed. Dreamworks faired OK with Bugz, but as long as Pixar remains a seperate entity that writes its own scripts, no-on will do much to touch them in the 3D feature area.
What else were you thinking of?
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
grain of salt the size of a Ford Taurus
Next we'll see stuff like "this new graphics card is sweeter than a Pepsi on a hot summer day".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...means a truly mouse-driven user experience.
/me dodges tomatoes.
Now that's the pot calling the kettle black!
.sig here "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity"??
/. is so international, maybe he's never heard the saying before, so he doesn't unnderstand it.
;)
My, My. Aren't we the picture of racial enlightenment? I rather you just say it than use boring, trite euphemisms like this bit. I can't believe that the moderators will let something like this slip, but as soon as some one says something in defense of one of the Truly Taboo Topics, Boom: -2.
Wait, wait. Everyone's jumping on this guy assuming he's a troll. But you've missed 2 possible explanations. Isn't someone's
Possible explanation 1: Maybe "the pot calling the kettle black" is a mostly American/European saying. (I don't know). Since
Possible explanation 2: Poor guy is a product of the American educational system and doesn't know that way back in time before aluminum, pots and kettles used to be made of cast iron, and were, well, black.
So, give him a break. Assume he doesn't know that it's a silly saying. Maybe it should be changed to be more modern. Like, oh, I don't know, "There's Clinton calling Beatty a womanizer"
Merde, il pleut encore!