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@ D6: Diller On The Liberty Spat and Life After

Updated with video clips, after the jump, courtesy of AllThingsD:

Barry Diller is on stage at D conference, speaking about the Liberty spat and his stint at Delaware court: “Partnerships are marriages without the ‘stuff’...the Delaware walkthrough is not my idea of life. What it was about was not the bomb throwing that emanated from various sources…it was about whether I had the rights on the shares. The court gave its unambiguous answer. It was a three month clump of life that I could have done without, but as they say, things happen….I didn’t want to sell an asset of ours if it didn’t have enough value.”

The rationale of split, again: “There is always something wrong when you have those many businesses…we had 63 brands. I was truly fighting uphill. I don’t have as much time as Rupert, or Sumner, whether living or not.”

The new new IAC: “The new IAC (NSDQ: IACI) is all pure Internet…naturally related to each other. It is involved in multiple iterations of Internet life. No one else in the Internet space does that…no one has multiple sites that relate each other, that are businesses on their own, and yet do their own thing.” More after the jump, with the video clip:

Product development: “I want to get back to the thing I have always been: in the product business. I have always been the product and editorial business. We are just starting in that…I am very excited about the original news product,” referring to the Tina Brown news project. He didn’t give away the name…

On Yahoo-Microsoft: “When a company gets a 60 percent premium offer for the shareholders and then spends three months trying to find an alternative and can’t, and then still survive independently, then one side has to be wily, and the other side has to be incompetent. You pick which is which.”  Then a bit later: “One of the problems with Yahoo-Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is that it took three months in which everyone had a voice. Taking outside opinion on things is not a good idea…then you have to go past your essential comfort zone and make some stupid decisions.”

 

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May 28, 2008 1:09 PM ET

Posted In: Companies, IAC, Microsoft, Yahoo, barry diller, liberty media

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Comments (2)

May 28, 2008 2:29 PM

How is Tina Brown’s project “original news” if it’s aggregation?  Would be nice if he knew what products he was launching.

jb

May 28, 2008 2:48 PM

He didn’t elaborate…I think he is taking cues from what HuffPo dos: mix of aggregation and original news.

Rafat Ali

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