The future at Disney is lame? I think not!

Well, back in the saddle after a long, no make that short, night on AMTRAK.  Everything went pretty well, but you gotta love getting in at 5 in the morning!

Anyhow, it's been a busy week and yet a quiet week on the Disney front.  Nothing much in the financial press this week that I can find, everybody must be waiting for next week's financial call for the 3rd quarter.  It will be interesting to see what the market does to Disney shares in anticipation of the announcement.  

Of course I, like most of you, don't really expect anything earth shaking.  My bet is that Disney will affirm their current guidance, talk a little about all the great things they have going on and that are in the works and post respectable numbers for the 3rd quarter. 

They will NOT, I repeat NOT, get pulled into predicting the future, talking about trending indicators for bookings, how oil will affect the future, or any such stuff based on internal management accounting.  They never do (nor do most companies) and this time won't be any different. 

Not that Mr. Iger and Mr. Staggs won't be asked. . . the analyst crowd will be on it like white on rice. 

The only real surprise will be if for some reason they suddenly trend downward for their end of year financial targets. . . but I wouldn't bet on it, since the summer will probably still post strong numbers for pre-booked vacations.

Some of you probably also saw over at The Washington Post an article that pretty closely paralleled our in-depth look at the new Home of the Future our in California.  The article is an overall downbeat piece on the technology shortcomings of the 'future' showcased in the Parks. 

I don't agree with most of what the author has to say, but we do seem to agree that the Home of the Future could have been a little further into the future.  At the end he twists Arthur C. Clark's 3rd law (which I have as the preamble to my resume) to basically saw that Disney can't seem to invent the future anymore. 

Most of the problem is that technology improvements today are on a scale much different than they were in the 1960's.  Today we are making technology advances in the nanometer and smaller space or even in software, not so much in the more macro-space that lends itself to massive theme park 'areas'. 

So I don't really find it that off putting that Disney struggles with this.  Most Fortune 500 companies struggle with it too, especially those who work in the micro space.

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UPDATE: Fixed a few niggling typo's and grammatical things.