Word: diller
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...Barry Diller sure thinks so. Two long years after the architect of the Fox Network departed his perch at QVC for exile in the Media Mogul Wilderness, the poker-faced, once-and-future content king is ready to reveal his latest card. It is Consumer's Edge, a software developer based in La Jolla, California, that hopes to earn a slice of the online commerce pie by offering what CEO Steve Tomlin calls "deep interviews"--extensive Q&As that match consumers with pretty much any product known to the free market...
...company's potential to match buyers and sellers is what caught Diller's eye. Diller and Tomlin first worked together at QVC; Diller was the chairman, Tomlin a high-tech executive who had phoned looking for a job after reading how much Diller loved his Powerbook. Both left QVC in the fall of 1994; a few months later, Diller recalls, Tomlin called him again: "'I've found these two guys in a garage...
...guys in question, Tom Sammon and Brad Scurlock, wanted to release an early iteration of their deep-interview software on CD-ROM and invited Diller to invest 5% or 10% of the necessary capital. Diller tested the product and counteroffered: he'd put in 100% if they would return to the garage until he deemed their product ready for prime time...
...stations with news footage was a priority starting in the early '90s. "There was a conscious decision made that we would not produce at the network level a national newscast," says Paul Amos, who ran the Fox News Service from 1991 to 1993. "Rupert and [former Fox chairman] Barry Diller felt strongly that the hallmark of Fox News would be locally produced programs with assistance at the national level." Amos' staff did no news gathering but acted essentially as a distribution service, gathering stories from overseas suppliers and from Fox-owned stations in the U.S. and feeding them to affiliates...
...Diller likes to climb mountains," says Brandon Tartikoff, former head of the NBC Entertainment Group, who was a direct rival when Diller was at Fox. Tartikoff tells a story that reflects Diller's competitive fire. The two men attended the same Los Angeles party in 1990, on the day that Tartikoff announced NBC's fall schedule. "Barry came up, and we shot the breeze for a while. And then he leaned in close and said, very casually, 'We're going to announce that we're putting The Simpsons against The Cosby Show.' It made me feel sick to my stomach...