However, the conversation moved from the background to the foreground on Wednesday afternoon as two of Jobs’s longtime friends — Ed Catmull and Larry Ellison — shared their reflections with Walt Mossberg.

Naturally, there was lots of talk about Jobs’s charisma, legendary negotiating skills and vision.

But Catmull noted that not all of these qualities were there in Jobs’s early days, something that Ellison agreed cost him his job at the helm of Apple.

“The way he negotiated, the way he interacted with people, didn’t initially work well,” Catmull said. However, Catmull said that Jobs was smart enough to see this and learn from it.

Among the fascinating stories was the tale of how Jobs and Ellison got to know one another as neighbors more than 20 years ago.

Jobs’s girlfriend had given him a live peacock as a birthday present and Ellison went over to Jobs’s house to complain about the noisy bird, noting he was a programmer and didn’t like to be awakened early.

“You don’t like that bird either?” Jobs asked Ellison.

Jobs said he would tell the girlfriend that he had to get rid of the bird, but only if Ellison backed him up.

As for Pixar, Catmull noted that Jobs had a different presence.

“Steve never came to a story meeting,” Catmull said, noting that he deferred to the creative team. “It was actually pretty amazing.”

Jobs’s key characteristic, Ellison said, was struggling through every detail, obsessing about it until it was fixed to his satisfaction. Apple came to be the most valuable company in the world, but that wasn’t even one of Jobs’s goals, Ellison said.

“He wasn’t trying to be rich,” Ellison said. “He wasn’t trying to be famous. He wasn’t trying to be powerful. He was obsessed with the creative process and building something that was beautiful.”

But, Ellison said, Jobs did call his friend when Apple passed Oracle in market capitalization, noting that a lot of folks in Silicon Valley measure themselves by their company’s value. And, Ellison said, the crazy thing was Apple kept going up and up. So much so that Ellison called Jobs to tell him to knock it off and that he was making everyone else look bad.

As for Jobs’s signature outfit of a black mock turtleneck and jeans, Ellison said it wasn’t a fashion statement as much as it was Jobs not wanting to have to invest time and energy thinking about what to wear.

It wasn’t all sunshine, though, as Ellison reflected on how exasperating his best friend could be.

“He was a bit of a control freak,” Ellison said.

“He was?” Walt quipped.

“A little bit,” Ellison said. “He wanted to engineer every bit of the user experience.”

Ellison noted that he grew so tired of seeing Jobs show him a slightly updated version of “Toy Story” ahead of the film’s release that he would only visit if Jobs promised not to show the movie again.

The Oracle chief said that he also grew tired of spending Sundays walking through a mock-up of the Apple Store talking about the checkout process and bemoaning the flaws in the Oracle software.

“Steve did want to debate things,” Ellison said. “You had to be able to persuade him, but he would listen. He wanted to build the best possible products.”

But Jobs could be brutal to his workers as well. “He learned to temper that,” Ellison said.

There was also consensus from the panelists that there really is no way to imitate Jobs just by looking at his management style. As Ellison put it, it’s like trying to paint like Picasso by wondering if you need more red.

The talk began with a video highlighting some of Jobs’s many appearances at the D conference over the years.

Jobs appeared on the D stage six times before he passed away last October, including a memorable joint panel in 2007 with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

As the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios, the five-time Oscar-winner has overseen such hits as “Toy Story,” “Cars” and “Up.” Disney/Pixar’s next film, “Brave,” which is coming out soon, is also highly anticipated.

So how does he do it?

“I read a lot of business books,” Catmull said. “Most of them were true, but content-free.”

What he means by that is that executives are some of the last people to know exactly what is going on inside of an organization and, by default, organizations have a hard time being honest with themselves.

“The things going on are not visible to the people doing them,” Catmull said. “They are happening here and now at Pixar, and I can’t see them.”

Because of the difficulty in seeing one’s own flaws, he says they have to push to create an open and honest working environment. “We wrestle with hard problems, and shut things down when they don’t work.”

As an example, he said they’ve canned at least one major project, which he declined to disclose, and said that certain movies, such as “Toy Story 2,” required a serious rewrite in order for audiences to love it.

His other piece of advice to the D10 audience had to do with recognizing when you have an overreliance on technology.

“Our goal is to make a good movie; for a lot of people the goal is on the technology. The technology is not the goal. It is to create a good movie, and there’s something about the infusion of technology into the artistic process that enhances both.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

Now, with a 12th film on the way — “Brave” — Catmull, who started at Pixar in 1979 when it was still a division of Lucasfilm, presides over a company that continues to set new standards for animated entertainment. Which makes him both an industry titan and a historian.

Onstage at D10 on Wednesday, Catmull reflected on his role as celebrity computer scientist and bona fide five-time Oscar-winning Hollywood player.

“When Pixar first came together, initially we were just trying to survive as a company,” Catmull said. “But in the end, our goal was to change animation. … We wanted to make the first feature animated film. And we wanted it to look good and be interesting.”

So how did Pixar do it?

“We used reality as a benchmark,” Catmull said. “Reality was so far out of reach that it helped guide us toward the problems that we needed to solve.”

1995 brought with it the first fruit of that effort, “Toy Story,” which distinguished itself by its great narrative. And that has become a hallmark of Pixar films.

“Our goal was to make a good movie, not demonstrate our technology,” Catmull said. “One of the things that differentiated us at the beginning is not the technology, but to make a good movie. It’s to use technology to tell a good story.”

A few other highlights from the session:

On Disney
When Disney acquired Pixar, it was very important to me that we not merge the two companies. Disney Animation was not healthy when we got there. And our goal was to turn it around.

Why Toys?
We picked toys because we could depict them well. It’s hard to do skin and hair and make it look realistic. But it’s okay to make plastic toys look like plastic toys.

Hopes for Animation
What I’d like to see are films that are unique and different and touch people in a human way, getting at emotions and human life.

On Role Models
When I was a kid in the ’50s, my two idols were Walt Disney and Albert Einstein.

On Sequels
When we first started, sequels were considered a bad idea. The film that changed everything was “Toy Story 2.” What we discovered with that is that a sequel is no easier to make than the original. So the way we think about it is this: We should only make it if we have a director that’s passionate to do it. If you don’t have someone with that passion, it’s not the right thing to do.

On First Reactions to “Toy Story”
When we first did “Toy Story,” some people couldn’t figure out what we were doing. I remember executives at certain companies watching it and saying we should just use our technology to make commercials.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

And, of course, there are apps for that.

Disney Publishing has just released the first in a series of new Chinese-language apps for the iPad, based on the international teaching method known as Diglot Weave. The first app, called Learn Chinese: Toy Story 3, includes multiple versions of Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” broken up into five parts that offer layers of Chinese-language instruction with sequentially increasing degrees of difficulty.

That’s right: Woody and Buzz speak Mandarin!

The app offers background music and sound effects, audio and visual translations of individual words (using Pinyin, the standard system for transcribing Chinese into Latin script) alongside one-tap pronunciation guides, and voice-recording capabilities, so users can practice and compare their pronunciations with the audio narrator.

It’s available for iPad only, though Russell Hampton, president of Disney Publishing Worldwide, says Disney plans to expand eventually to other tablets, and will offer more apps and Disney-owned titles. This one costs $4.99 in the iTunes App Store.

There are currently more than 300 Chinese-language instructional apps for kids in the App Store; more than 200 results come up for Mandarin-language apps in the Android marketplace, though it appears that many of these are for adults and are also geared toward traditional language learning through repetition and exercises. The Diglot Weave method that Disney is going with involves teaching the language through a story that’s told partially in the learner’s native language and partially in the foreign tongue, gradually increasing the level of foreign language used throughout the narrative.

Disney has been pushing foreign-language instruction since 2009, when it launched a handful of schools across China. While Disney said at the time that its goal was authentic English-language learning, the push was also seen as a way for Disney to expand its brand reach across a nation known for tightly-controlled media.

Let’s assume that some of you are interested in taking your old DVDs to Walmart, and paying up to $5 a disc so you can access the movies on them from Vudu, Walmart’s cloud-based service. Fair enough — different strokes and all of that.

But we’re going to have to shrink the size of this theoretical group a bit. Because Walmart’s new “disc to digital service” won’t work for:

• People who want to watch Disney or Pixar movies. Disney is working on its own cloud service, and isn’t joining the five other major studios on this one.
• People who want to download the movies to iPhones and iPads. Users of iOS can stream Vudu movies to their devices, but can’t keep them on their machines.
• People who want to stream or download their movies on Android phones or tablets. I’m sure there’s a good biz-dev reason that Vudu doesn’t support Google’s OS, because I can’t think of a technical one.

You can download and stream movies to Windows or Mac PCs. Walmart says Vudu will work on “more than 300” devices, but I only count 211 on the service’s Web site, and most of those are Internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players.

I guess there are some people who would rather go to Walmart and upload their movies instead of ripping them directly from their DVDs to their PCs, even though it’s very easy. Maybe they are very, very interested in obeying the law, because — weirdly — it’s technically illegal to copy a movie you own, even for personal use.

But I can’t figure out who’s going to use disc-to-digital to watch movies on their TVs, since it’s very likely they already have a machine that plays discs sitting right next to their TVs. (Based on the promotional video Walmart has rolled out, it can’t either. As you can see at the bottom of this post, it’s playing up disc-to-digital’s mobile advantages.)

I’m also pretty skeptical that anyone who doesn’t have kids will have much interest in making digital copies of movies they already own. The reason that Hollywood is working on schemes like this to promote movie ownership is that most people have figured out they’d rather rent. Not because they’re constrained by device compatibility, but because they only want to watch a movie once or twice.

Kids’ movies are the big exception here. I think lots of people would jump through lots of hoops to get copies of kids’ movies on as many devices as possible. But the absence of all those Disney movies, and all those Pixar movies, sure looks like a problem for that pitch.

But I don’t want to end the evening on a negative note! So take a look at Walmart’s video. It’s pleasant enough. And perhaps at some point, Walmart figures out how to rope Disney in, add more devices to its lineup, and actually deliver on the promise sketched out below:

For 2012, they are focusing on making TVs “smarter” by enabling them to connect to the Internet for apps and video services on the Web.

But that doesn’t mean 3-D is going away. It’s just riding shotgun with smart TVs.

Smart TV is not a new concept, of course. Up until now, it has been defined as Internet-connected television achieved through a separate box or device that connects to the TV and streams Internet content, or via a computer-like processor built directly into the TV.

On the showroom floor in Las Vegas next week, electronics makers including Samsung Electronics, Sony and LG Electronics are expected to show off more television sets that bring Internet connectivity to entertainment centers for the home. Yesterday, Google announced that LG will join the list of companies supporting Google TV; Samsung, Sony, and Vizio Inc. have also adopted Google’s Internet TV technology.

With Apple rumored to have a possible Internet-connected HDTV in the pipeline, TV makers are making all kinds of pushes to bring to market devices that offer consumers a full range of options. For many consumers, the answer for now will still be external devices that offer easy, upgradable solutions, like the Microsoft Xbox, Apple TV, Google TV and even Roku’s latest gadget.

Analysts believe that Internet-enabled TVs will begin to take a larger share of the market by default, eventually becoming a check-off item for consumers, rather than a special feature. Some 60 percent of new televisions being sold in 2012 are expected to have Internet connectivity. According to NPD’s DisplaySearch, connected-TV shipments are expected to reach 138 million globally by 2015, accounting for 47 percent of all flat-panel TVs.

So where does 3-D fit into all this?

TV makers will still be touting 3-D at CES 2012, as many smart TVs will also include 3-D capabilities. Samsung Electronics, for instance, says that more than half of its 2012 TV models will support 3-D. “Our commitment to 3-D is only deepening,” says Ethan Raisel, director of communications at Samsung.

Tim Alessi, Director of New Product Development at LG, estimates that around 20 percent of all LG TV units will support 3-D, and notes that 3-D is featured in 50 percent of the company’s lineup for this year.

But despite the fact that 3-D TV sales in 2011 showed some encouraging gains — with an estimated 21.5 million 3-D units reported to have shipped last year and sales showing significant gains from quarter to quarter — the forced exuberance over three-dimensional screens has been tempered a bit.

That’s likely because it doesn’t matter how well 3-D TV units are selling — for the consumer, anyway. “It’s not really the penetration that matters, it’s the use,” says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey. “You’d be hard pressed to find a 3-D TV owner that actually uses it in 3-D mode even once a week. That’s not a formula for building consumer momentum.”

For TV, 3-D presents a three-headed monster: To start, there are the technical and psychological obstacles of those pesky 3-D glasses — and while autostereoscopic (glasses-free) 3-D technology is being worked on in many R&D labs, industry experts all agree that quality 3-D without glasses is at least a few years away.

Secondly, 3-D presents a chicken-and-egg dilemma that doesn’t exist with smart-TV features — the question of where the viewable content will come from. Many content creators have been holding off on making 3-D programs. The Discovery Channel and ESPN made headlines two years ago when they announced 3-D channels; but in terms of sports, 3-D has been relegated to key events, due to high production costs.

An increasing number of 3-D movies are available on DVD, but moviemakers that hopped aboard the 3-D train early — think Pixar Animation Studios and DreamWorks Animation — were likely doing so to plant a flag in the ground for when 3-D finally does hit critical mass in the living room, says Scott Steinberg, head of strategic consulting firm TechSavvy.

Sony Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer even said recently, regarding the company’s 3-D TV push, that he hadn’t realized all of the challenges in getting 3-D content in place.

And the third issue affecting the uptake of 3-D has been the cost of the sets. On average, the cost of 47-inch to 50-inch 3-D TV sets is $400 more than similar HDTVs, according to a 2011 report from Retrevo. And while the entire consumer electronics industry has been hurt by a weak U.S. economy, TV sales have been hit particularly hard.

Steinberg says that for the average American household, television purchasing is about being practical right now. “It’s much more important to have the maximum-value TV with Internet capabilities and apps, than to invest in a still-unproven technology like 3-D.”

A December 2011 report from Parks & Associates on consumer purchasing intent also indicates that smart TVs are what’s grabbing the interest of consumers right now.

Even that report points out that smart TVs won’t deliver the killer blow to 3-D. As smart TVs are punched up with even more features — from apps to motion remotes to voice-command capabilities — more middle-class households looking to purchase smart TVs may buy in to 3-D, whether they’re actively looking for it or not.

Whether consumers actually want to sit in their living rooms and wear 3-D glasses to watch TV remains to be seen. For now, TV makers will still insist that they do.

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
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• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
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• Ultrabooks From HP and Lenovo That Are (Kinda, Sorta) Different
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• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
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• Motorola CEO: We’re Going to Release Fewer Phones This Year
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• More From T-Mobile CEO: On Pricing, LTE and That Ever-Elusive iPhone
• Exclusive: New Boss Acknowledges Windows Phone Still Has “Awareness Problem”
• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
• Interview: T-Mobile CEO Says No Second AT&T Deal Out There
• Grover Is at CES and I Am Missing It
• BlueStacks Bringing Android Apps to Windows 8
• Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon
• Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways
• Dynamic Dual Coverage: Ballmer’s Last Act in Vegas and the BCS Championship in 3-D
• Microsoft Phoning In Its Last CES Keynote
• Myspace — Yes, Myspace — Says It’s Going to Sell You Web TV
• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
• Nokia Unveils That LTE Windows Phone It’s Been Dying to Share
• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
• LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum
• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
• CES Notebook: The Constant Search for Power and Vegas’ Worst-kept Secret
• Belkin Bringing Mobile TV to Lots of Cellphones, Will Anyone Tune In?
• Acer Introduces “World’s Thinnest” Ultrabook and a “Me-Too” Cloud Service
• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
• CES 2012: Snooki and Bieber Are In, Gaga Is Out!
• Coming to a Smartphone Near You: Gorilla Glass 2
• RIM Hopes Next PlayBook OS Will Impress at CES
• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
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• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

You’ll forgive both groups if they’re a tad skeptical.

But if you feel like extending Reed Hastings the benefit of the doubt once more, then pay attention to the shareholder letter he published yesterday — in particular, the part where he explains the company’s content strategy.

In the end, if Hastings does deliver, this is the plan that will let him do it. And it’s a change from the company’s original content strategy, which means some folks haven’t figured it out yet.

Short version: When Netflix was a DVD company, it could afford to offer just about every movie or TV show every made. Now that it’s a streaming video company, it has to pick and choose.

So Hastings is trying to build an $8-a-month version of HBO — a network you pay for in addition to your regular TV package, not one that replaces it. And to make that work, he doesn’t have to have everything — but he has to have stuff you can’t get anywhere else.

Here’s an extended excerpt from his letter:

In television… the networks (ABC, FX, etc.) have long relied upon exclusive content to differentiate among themselves. As video moves online, so too has this practice of exclusive content. HBO has an exclusive license to recent Universal movies that includes its online HBO GO, for example. Netflix has signed exclusive licenses for DreamWorks Animation, for Relativity, and others. In episodic television, exclusives are also the norm. Netflix doesn’t license “Deadwood” from HBO because they see strategic value in keeping it exclusive. Netflix licenses “Mad Men” and “House of Cards” exclusively for much the same reason.

…We don’t have to “beat” Starz or other networks to succeed…We won’t have every movie or TV series; but we do provide enough value that consumers also want to subscribe to Netflix.

Any given consumer will have only one of DirecTV or Comcast, say, for their video service. That is classic either‐or competition. But with premium television networks like Netflix, the more good experiences there are, the more consumers are willing to spend to have multiple channels from which to get enjoyment.

Simple, right? The complicated part is the execution, of course. Hastings and his team have to figure out what their customers, and future customers, will value, and how much Hastings and his team can afford to pay for it.

And if they make the wrong calls — if it turns out that “House of Cards” isn’t interesting to anyone besides Kevin Spacey, or if the DreamWorks movies don’t satisfy people who used to watch the Pixar movies Netflix used to have — then Netflix really is toast.

But Hastings still has some 25 million subscribers, which means he still has plenty of money to keep betting — during his earnings call yesterday, he said the company’s content bill had shot up to $3.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion just a year ago. That’s not enough to pay for an unlimited supply of videos. But it should be enough to build a decent pay TV channel.

Jobs, Gore reminded the audience, had become a Disney board member after selling his Pixar animation shop. “He used to talk initially about how after Walt Disney died, the company always got in trouble about asking ‘what would Walt do in this situation?’” Gore said. “And he made it very clear — ‘I don’t want that at Apple.’ He made it clear to Tim Cook and everyone else, ‘Don’t ask what Steve would have done. Follow your own voice.’”

Gore also defended the Apple board, which has come under some criticism for not forcing Jobs to publicly disclose a detailed corporate succession plan: “If you were running a corporation, and you had a star-studded executive team, would you really think it would be a smart thing to lay out in public your thinking about who’s going to move to what position over the next couple years? Of course not!”