...what with the institutional investors all having bailed out on Disney, there's no single entity that owns more than about 5% of the company, at the moment. That means that Eisner is, for the most part, bullet-proof right now. The board of directors are hand-picked Eisnerites (including his kid's elementary school principal, I'm told), so there's really no one who has the clout and/or the stones to tell Eisner anything, anymore.
Given the business decisions Eisner has made over the last five to ten years, there is no reason for a logical person to believe that Eisner will do anything except continue to cut budgets and corners. The single remaining motivator for Eisner is maximizing stock price at the point in time he decides to cash out.
Disney, as a producer of quality entertainment products, has been in intensive care for a decade. Thatr aspect of Disney will remain on life support until Eisner decides it's time to pull the plug.
Because Eisner's intentions for his own regime have been made crystal clear, the only real question about Disney's future is the question of what, precisely, will happen once Eisner takes his checks and goes home. Unfortunately, I only see two options: first, that Iger or Pressler or someone else who has suckled at Eisner's low-balling teats takes over and continues to destroy the company, or, second, that all the rats leave the sinking ship at once, leaving a vacuum at the top. Even when it's an evil regime that is ousted, a complete absence of leadership isn't going to help things, either.
The best we can hope for is that all the rats leave on the same golden parachute, and that the parts of Disney that mean the most to us as individuals get sold to someone who cares. For me, that's only the theme parks, anymore. The animation division that was once the heart of the company has already been cut out; other than the smattering of remaining talent that can take jobs anywhere, there's nothing left to salvage.
The parks will exist for our lifetimes, there's too much there to simply shutter them. With any luck, whoever the next owners of the parks turn out to be, they'll be folks who want to recreate the Disney name's connection to achingly high quality.
That's my last hope for Disney, the creative company, amounting to anything significant in the future.
Jeff
PS: I personally like the ESPN franchise, and some other parts of today's Disney, but then again, I liked ESPN before Mike got his hands on it. A lot of what is now "Disney" is only connected to the name by Eisner writing a check for it, and I'm quite confident that ESPN will do fine under any new ownership.
The parts of "Disney" that built the brand are the dead animation division and the struggling parks division. The heart is weakening and the soul is long gone--the rest is just materialism on a corporate scale.
