The translation? Glaser to Jobs: Do a deal or else.
After Jobs and his entourage had a good chuckle and a restful weekend, they promptly leaked the contents of the proposal to The New York Times.
The translation? Jobs to Glaser: Buzz off.
If there's one takeaway from Microsoft's antitrust trial, it's that hot e-mails always come back to haunt the author.
The formative plot would seemingly suggest room for common cause. But Glaser gambled wrong on several counts.
Apple couldn't care less about a promise from RealNetworks to rejigger its RealPlayer jukebox so as to support the iPod. RealNetworks attributes its declining share of the media-streaming business to illegal competition from Microsoft. The courts will decide that one. I long ago deleted RealPlayer from my desktop, because I found it to be an annoying, inferior product. Lots of other people apparently feel the same way.
Glaser also trusted Jobs to remain discreet about the offer. What was he thinking? Putting a revolver on the table while you offer terms may work in Tony Soprano's world--but not in Silicon Valley. In Jobs, Glaser faces an executive with an ego even bigger than his own. "You gonna' mess with me? No, I'm gonna' mess with you!"
Worse, Glaser's gun had no bullets. The Listen.com digital music service RealNetworks operates sells subscriptions. But at the San Francisco debut of the iTunes store a year ago, Jobs scoffed at the assumption that people want to rent and not own their music. Given the history, you can understand why Glaser's offer has left Apple underwhelmed.
If I'm Steve Ballmer, Glaser's blunder just reduced the cost of any possible settlement with RealNetworks by several hundred million dollars.
RealNetworks slapped Microsoft with a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit late last year. So why is Glaser now telling Jobs that that he's got a big incentive to switch over to the Microsoft Windows Media format? Fact is that RealNetworks does have an incentive to pursue a licensing deal with its old rival. Unlike Apple, Microsoft has a piece of technology that would make music subscriptions more attractive on portable players. So why not raise the subject in a face-to-face meeting, a telephone call or carrier pigeon--anything other than let Jobs forward the e-mail for sport to his flunkies?
If I'm Steve Ballmer, Glaser's blunder just reduced the cost of any possible settlement with RealNetworks by several hundred million dollars. Glaser, a former Microsoft executive, should have known better. Apparently, you can take the boy out of Microsoft, but you can't take Microsoft out of the boy.
Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.
See more CNET content tagged:
Rob Glaser,
RealNetworks Inc.,
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digital music,
RealNetworks RealPlayer
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli
I can't reccomend it more highly. No popups, no spyware, just a media player that WORKS. Real wouldn't play full-screen on my laptop. Why? Who knows. But MPC worked full-screen beautifully. MPC plays Real, Quicktime, and DivX.
This is a great GPL-licensed project that as soon as I'm employed again, I'll be donating to.
mike
> RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser just proved how very bright
folks sometimes wind up making the dumbest decisions.
No, Real has been making dumb decisions from the getgo.
=They= closed their standard and forced authors to buy
expensive encoders. -They- embraced DRM and ergo choke
their own market. And -they- don't know where they are in the
food chain of hardware and software providers.
There are one too many formats for audio and video, and the
crappiest one is Real. Congratulations, Rob. Same time next year
I won't have to look at music videos with shabby compression or
audio streams that choke, because your company won't be
around.
It evokes that crazy axiom: "information wants to be free."
That's a certifiable canard when it comes to the cost of information -- you have to be terminally naive to believe it, let alone espouse it. It's akin to saying "information wants to be worthless." But it does ring true in terms of digitized content -- emails especially -- being freely distributed since that it is ipso facto impossible to control once it leaves your desktop.
Also, like Charles Cooper, I found RealPlayer -- in a trial period -- to be a really underwhelming experience. It didn't help that my trial sub was prematurely canceled, and when I called to inquire, was told by the customer rep that "sometimes that happens by mistake" but that he couldn't help me; I'd have to contact the RealNetworks executive who extended the professional courtesy. That person never responded to my email. Guess he no longer wanted RealPlayer "information" to be free to me.
I didn't find the content sticky enough at first blush, but the indifferent customer service wasn't worth the aggravation of sticking around to give it another chance.
About the only thing I can't agree with in Mr. Cooper's column is his corrupting the time-honored expression of irony -- "could care less" -- into "couldn't care less." He's literally correct but literately wrong.