Barry Diller: Net's New Poster Boy?
from the moving-forward dept
Barry Diller has never given up his belief that strong business can be created online. Suddenly, people are noticing that he’s built up quite the online empire. When this strategy was first coming together two years ago, many people were skeptical, but so far, his strategy is working. The obvious part of the strategy was realizing that remaining dot coms were very cheap now. So, as others stayed away, Diller started spending. The other parts of his strategy might sound like they were “bubble-time” strategies: “get mindshare – it’s a landgrab time”, “be the middleman” and “conglomerates can work”. In the end, once again, it appears to be a situation where execution matters. So far, Diller seems to be doing a good job. Of course, if everything collapses a year from now, everyone will once again be making fun of these strategies. I think the big difference between this “conglomerate” and past ones is that Diller is only spending on services that people pay for. In the original dot com boom, people were buying companies that just had a lot of visitors. There’s a big difference there…
