Disney's Cloudy Vision - Part 1

Today's Disney has the idea backwards: Disney Parks should be imagined as places where a particular character/IP would live, not create an Avengers/Frozen/Coco area.

This has been going on since Iger, and Chapek has decided to leave that as it is, and drive the attendance and "plus-ups" route.  Instead of a fantastic, immersive experience for everyone, even if the cost has to rise, there's a push to get the base experience to "you are here", and everything else is an add-on: want to get to Disney from the airport?  Pay up.  Want to get on the rides?  Pay up.  

On top of that, they want to push you to certain areas.  They cloak it in an "improved experience", but Genie(+) is just a way to move you to the most profitable locations.  I'm sure there some good (planning staff schedules), but the main controls allow for them to point you to their idea of the "best experience."  

I just want to be able to drop into Disney World to walk around, jump on a ride, or grab some fish and chips without having to plan it 6 months out.  I really enjoyed the experience of being in Disney World - the atmosphere, the smiles, the immersion into a world away from the real world.

"Industry Standard" Has No Place In Disney

Disney has a vision problem.  This pandemic has taken this notion from "what is going on here?" to "oh!  That's what I've been experiencing the last 5 years."  I'm heartbroken to think the world of magic has become the world of "industry standard".

It's been going on for longer, but 2018 was the first hint of what was going on.  From the Disney Tourist Blog on March 14, 2018 (emphasis mine):

"Walt Disney World has indicated that this change is to bring their Florida hotels more in line with industry standards."

Disney is supposed to be where the Impossible is possible; an industry all its own without match or "standard". Other companies and people should be looking to Disney for what they can do.

From there, you can see that they've dropped the any pretense of "doing the impossible," and pivoted to "year-over-year growth for the shareholders".  

I know the "shareholders" issue is not unique to Disney, but Disney had a unique position for decades: Freedom to tinker; money as a tool, not the goal.  That freedom included allowing Imagineers to reach outside their role and find the keys that could bring the impossible to life. 

Journey into Imagination is not my favorite ride, but there's truth to what Figment says: "Imagination works best when it's set free."   

Money is needed, but Roy and Walt had a good flow going after their initial setbacks.  It may have been a slow climb, but they were trending in the right direction, and they did not have to force it.

Focusing only on profit growth has become a way to force guests to increase Disney profits, without providing anything novel, and, as you've seen recently, to take away without replacing perks that have made the Disney experience compelling. 

In a future post (posts?), I'll provide some additional details from previous trips.  It's a wild ride that even Mr. Toad would not like. 

Breath - The missing manuals

 I was not surprised to learn that I was breathing wrong, but it still feels wrong that I find myself having to fix it.  

I'll say it up front: breathing through my nose only when exercising (running, calisthenics, jump roping, etc...) has improved my post-workout recovery.  I no longer have to suck down water like I just traveled through the desert; I no longer have exercise-induced asthma from running in the cold.  

Also: breathe it all out.  You may feel like you're gasping for air, but I've found that exhaling more has improved the intake.  Try it next time.  When you're breathing heavy, do you actually exhale all the air you can, or do you continuously inhale before the full exhale, and just continue to push down the old air in your lungs.

Breath by James Nestor was a bit dry, but enlightening.  I say dry mainly because there was no real passion focused on any techniques - or the change in breathing itself.  It was, for all intents and purposes, an overview of Breathing techniques around the world and through history.  But that is what I needed.  He did the time, and it is fully worth the price.

Now, Mr. Nestor has introduced me to a host of new practices which I hope to visit over the next few months.  While I would highly recommend reading the book, his list of breathing videos on his site are valuable on their own.

One thing I did realize after reading it was just how little follow through I tend to have.  I stumbled on Wim Hof years ago, and made feeble attempts to do the breathing exercises.  They were interesting, but I did not take them seriously.  I'm still not doing them, but I will revisit it after some more time with the "through the nose only" exercises (note: these are not formal exercises in the book, just some takeaways that I found).

Let's Shelf "Technical Debt" and talk about "Design Debt"

As the Agile philosophy picked up steam (and started generating consulting profits), us developers were introduced to the concept of "Technical Debt."

Technical Debt was intended as a way to present sub-optimal technical implementations in the business "friendly" concept of financial debt.  The delta between the optimal solution and the sub-optimal solution is the debt you burden yourself with immediately.  This debt gains interest as long as you do not pay it back by implementing the (now possibly different) optimal solution.

While this metaphor is somewhat useful when discussing the impact of a decision with management, since it never reaches the stakeholder report, there's (in my experience) very little traction to fully pay back the debt.  You sometime make a "good faith" payment (interest only?), but you're usually just left with something "less bad."

We need to move past "Technical" Debt.  The impact is just not there, and very few engineers (or managers) will champion the payment of something that "just works as it is."  Paying customers pay for new things, or fixing their problems.

I propose we start teasing out the truth of the debt.  One of these is "Design Debt."  Design Debt is a high stakes debt that will crush your pace, and can make a seasoned engineer cry.

Design Debt is the sub-optimal design decision made because you are using an Agile Methodology: requirements firm up over multiple iterations, so the design decision you made in an earlier cycle (sprint, Epic, etc...) is already sub-optimal.

Take, for example, deciding that you should implement an Entity-Attribute-Value data model since you heard the customer make a high level request for a system that you can "dynamically add fields to." 

If you start moving forward with that (because we're "sprinting"), prior to engaging the customer in a deeper discussion, Congratulations!  You've got "Design Debt".

And 3 years later, after you're finally going to production, and find the system cannot show a significant portion of your data because it times out querying for the data, you now have to allocate a full time senior developers time for, oh, 8 months to completely tear it out and put in a normalized data model.

If you get just one thing from the above, make it that Entity-Attribute-Value is a last resort model! 

That Was Quick

I dropped the idea of a streaming service changing the video you're watching for each view, and then AT&T gets called out for deciding to change your stream to better target ads.  I recommend you read the Verge article.

The plan AT&T lays out is much more disturbing: they'll combine data from all their properties - cellular, phone, media  change the stream - which will allow them to track you from watching the ad, to actually acting on the ad.  The Verge describes a customer who watches a car ad, and then is tracked going to the dealership. 

I suppose the positive is that you will not have to fill out that survey question about "Where did you hear about us?"

Delete My Data AND The Extracted Information

While I am generally not pro-active in insuring my privacy (I'm quite beholden to Google services), the idea of a 3rd party deleting my data, yet keeping the information their algorithms extracted from it bothers me.

How would I prove the results they generated were wrong?  What if the results have been collected over months or years, and now the Credit Agency see's me as a high risk?  The data used as input to those algorithms is gone now (yay Privacy & Right to Be Forgotten).  How are you going to prove that it was an error and should be removed?  I'm not even sure what data they were collecting.

Moving forward, what if governments worked this way: your data is only on our systems momentarily, and then removed.  Behind the scenes, you've been tagged as a high risk because of an error in the algorithm, and now you are no longer able to purchase a plane ticket.

How will you correct that situation?

It would be like an e-voting system that "recorded" the vote and then destroyed the actual input/ballot.  It flipped every 3rd or 4th vote, but there's no feasible way to prove and fix it.

So, either keep both my data that you used as input and the information you generated, or keep neither.

Did your Streaming Movie Change?

While I enjoy the convenience of digital streaming - be it Movies or Music - I am struck by the potential for some unknown hand to subtly change the scenes, sounds, dialog/vocals, or even "adjust the message".

Since I've purchased a digital copy only, I would not even be able to check to see if something did change.  Almost like a digital "gaslighting." 

Even if there is a physical, unmodified copy available, very few would be motivated to compare.  If it was truly subtle, it may be difficult to notice it.

I feel that this has been done recently - to a syndicated show in order to change the advertiser - and there being at least some discussion about it.  Unfortunately, I am not able to easily dig up anything on it.