Times change- strategies change. Promises made change. It is the nature of developing and morphing businesses. This recent news made my head spin.
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In 1998 – as President of the then AOL’s Web Properties Group – I met with Tim and Nina Zagat – we had a lovely lunch where we discussed the future of user reviews; the importance of community and anonymous critiques; and the growing importance of local commerce. AOL had acquired Mapquest and Moviefone to beef up our local practices. I believed in local commerce; I thought it was the next big thing. We wanted to build out – content – community – connectivity – commerce – all nationally and then locally! Digital Cities was our platform to do so.

AOL had launched Digital Cities – it was growing fast as a city guide – we wanted to include Zagats reviews into our online guides; and recruit AOL members to add to the review data base of Zagats; our discussion turned to business models and then to a potential acquisition of Zagats by AOL. We had also recruited Tribune Company as a partner to go big and fast at this local opportunity.

I was in support of this acquisition of Zagats as a concept but we struggled at the time with the acquisition because of its size and its reliance on selling print publications as a business model. I also remember feeling that we never wanted to get into the business of buying print based properties and compete with our partners.

Of course a year or so later we acquired Time Warner and for a time became the world’s largest magazine publisher! How ironic.

At the same time of these discussions we were entering a deal with a young company called Google as our search partner. We were one of Google’s first partners and we also were an early investor. See this great overview of the history of search and partnerships within. We had also partnered with Web Crawler Excite – Inktomi and others before Google.

I went on the press tour to introduce the AOL Search deal with Google with one of the founders of Google we had time to chat a lot and during our conversations he said to me “Think of us as a platform and technology supplier to you. We will never get into the connectivity business. We will never get into the ad sales business – we will never get into the publication or print business – that isn’t what we do.”

And now Google has acquired Zagat’s.

This is a really smart move. For both companies.

AOL has since introduced Patch – AOL’s long lost Digital Cities – on steroids with a focus on reviews and news.

I am involved with Groupon; the local curated commerce – company.

Google has entered that business as well.

Companies change – and industries change – we all morph – we are all in each other’s businesses.

You can never say never in this new media world.