February 28, 2006 | Tuesday
Barry Diller in…Jackass?
By Dylan Thwaites, CEO in Events |Quotations |Search Engines |Ask |Google
Watching Barry Diller for the first time, I had a LaToya Jackson moment. You’ll know that according to urban legend, nobody has ever seen her and Michael Jackson in the same room. I know it’s not quite as earth shattering, but think.... have you ever seen Barry Diller in the same room as Gerald Ford? No, neither have I. I don’t want to start off a conspiracy theory, but what if Gerald Ford, the first unelected US President and the first US President to appoint Donald Rumsfeld as Defence Secretary, was also the omnipotent Capo di Tutti Capi of Ask? First he would kill the butler (figures he probably knows too much) then maybe he’d declare a new company motto - “Be Evil”. Diller / Ford actually did say this - check the transcript.
OK, back to reality. Barry Diller impressed me, he’s a great salesman with a deeply hypnotic speaking voice. Even when he speaks nonsense like, “Differentiation makes the difference”, you find yourself nodding. This is the man whose Fox Network attacked and beat the three massively established players, NBC, ABC and CBS. He is no mug; he clearly believes that he can do the same with Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Should we accept his analysis? Are these three competitors the same?
It seems to me that Diller bases his premise on two forces - anti-matter and the speed of change.
He says, “The Google market share is anti-matter, market shares don’t stay at 30% [sic - most pundits claim Google has a higher market share figure than this --DT] unless there is an unnatural monopoly. Broadcasting doesn’t allow this, therefore there is an opportunity.”
This argument rests on two points:
Is search the same as broadcasting? Answer, probably not.
Does Google have an unnatural monopoly? It feels like it right now, with its growing market share, but consumer sentiment changes at astonishing pace. Later in the morning, Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise made an astonishingly bold but entirely credible prediction on who may usurp Google: Not MSN, not Ask, but MySpace, the home base of the young. (I’ll probably blog on this later.)
Diller’s second premise is speed of change. On this point there is no argument, he sees search as the glue binding all the convergence technologies together. He says, “It doesn’t matter what the screen is, it will all converge, the wired and the wireless. Distribution is not the issue, consumer products will enable everything”. Diller believes this converged scenario is only 2 or 3 years away, and we all know Google are not best placed to take advantage of it.
What I liked about Diller was the ballsiness. It will be great if he can find his killer application - at Fox it was The Simpsons, and we need him to produce another Homer moment. Even though he’s in his mid sixties, he’s not afraid of playing the long game: “Search is at its very beginning...we are fortunate to be working in a period of radical change”.
There is a cheeky kid in there, laughing as he mocks the grown ups.
MSN advertised search by losing a butterfly. Or was it a bee? I should remember - they spent $300 million.
or
Google is now a real business, so the mantra (Don’t Be Evil) is a bit pretentious.
So with hindsight, he’s not Gerald Ford, he’s Spike Jonze in Jackass, the one with the latex old man mask driving a runaway scooter. You remember his last line?
“Will you push me to the top? I wanna do it again.”
Kind of figures.
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