If you want some really interesting reading, find the full 17 page summary of Barry's comments. Here is a summary.
New York, March 2 (Bloomberg) -- The following are USA Networks Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Barry Diller's comments today on the Internet and USA Networks' agreement to buy Lycos Inc. He was the keynote speaker at Jupiter Communications' Consumer Online Forum in New York. On the burgeoning Internet industry: ''The wild funky ride that's daily life on the Internet will be transformed by real businesses generating real profits in the process of providing real services that real people need. Really.'' ''It seems to me that the Internet of the 1990s is to modern commerce what the land rush was to the 19th century. The Internet is an emerging market -- capital is gushing. Five years ago, it didn't exist. Five years from now, we won't recognize it. Confusion and disorder always occur in speculative environments.'' On the convergence of entertainment, information and direct selling: ''It's this convergence that I believe will fundamentally change, over time, everything we see, hear and know. Those companies that will be able to link and interconnect, in seamless ways, the direct selling of merchandise, of all kinds and scale, to national and local Internet searches and communities ... and then to use old-line aggregators like television to tell everyone about them -- it's those companies that can do all of those things that I would place (my money in), and I have.'' On the market reaction to the USA Networks-Lycos agreement: ''I think that the market overreacted. I think Lycos clearly had accelerated so much in the previous month because people said, ''This thing is going to get sold, just like Excite Inc. got sold (to At Home Corp.), with a big premium.'' ''As it turned out, the premium was very tiny -- (the market's) expectations were dashed.'' ''I think it's our fault, in the sense that we should have more carefully explained the transaction.'' ''There's a shareholder vote in three, four or five months. We have a lot of time to explain what we are doing. We are confident people will get it.'' |
