Fifteen years after Barry Diller had gone to see QVC the home shopping network, he was on CBS 60 minutes today. Within minutes of being on 60 minutes the Internet search engines were buzzing with searches for "Barry Diller" ! How much the media consumption experience has changed over the last 15 years !
And Barry Diller a former media executive guessed that there would be some kind of technology convergence in consumer buying behavior. I liked the way CBS showed the QVC format which historically involved infomercials,call centers and computer screens. Add the Internet and you have the huge and growing IAC portfolio. You would have used at least some of the famous IAC brands like Expedia,Ticket Master if not many others.
I also enjoyed the admission by Barry Diller and the clarification by his wife Diane von Furstenberg that he starts with only a fuzzy idea of where he is going to go. He "fakes it till he makes it" – I suppose all kinds of visioning is like that- you have to believe in something and see how you go, but keep going. In parting, Diller made a wonderful and thoughtful comparison between Google and IAC.While Google was a mega brand people didn’t know about IAC but if IAC became like Procter and Gamble ,which has so many famous brands – it would be great.I thought , this was a rather neat way of looking at a portfolio of Internet brands.