In the first part of this interview, Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, spoke with Wired News about the experiences that inspired him to create streaming multimedia for the Web, and about his days at Microsoft.
In today's conclusion, Glaser discusses the lack of responsiveness from his former employer that led him to testify against Microsoft's business practices to the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite his own reservations.
Wired News: Historically, you've always had a good relationship with Microsoft.
Glaser: Sure. They're some of the most brilliant, hard-charging people I've ever known. Plus, our philosophy [at RealNetworks] was that to think of Microsoft as the competition was not a good idea. People used to say about IBM in the '70s, "They're not the competition, they're the environment." We had no desire to compete with the environment.
WN: When did things turn sour?
Glaser: When we first noticed that Microsoft's product disabled our product, we went to them and said, "Do you think your product should be doing this?"
Depending on whom we asked, we got two responses: One was, "We want to do whatever we want to do with it. That's our decision." The other was, "We'll look at it. Maybe in some cases, we'll ask consumers first [if they want to be pointed to an upgrade of the software]." Then they put another beta out that had many of the same attributes, and we asked them again.
We had meetings where we said to them, "What's your principle on this?" And they said, "If we can play your formats, we'll play them. If we can't, we don't feel like we're under any obligation to tell users how to get versions of your software that do play them, because we want you to do that version of the software, and give it to us for free, and we'll distribute it with Windows."
And we said, "Hey, that seems like a separate business decision that we should make. If the version of our software that's already shipping either plays the clip or tells the user how to get the updated version of the software, if you're using our technology under license, the right decision for consumers is to support both modes of function. Play what you can play, and if you don't have the ability to play something, tell the user how to get the software that plays the advance version, whether or not you distribute it. That's just the right thing to do for consumers."
We were frankly shocked when the response that came back was, "For competitive reasons, we're not sure if we want to do that."
WN: Who suggested that you deliver the testimony at the Senate?
Glaser: [Senator Orrin] Hatch's people had been calling our general counsel for some months. They were putting out feelers several months back. The issues of Microsoft doing stuff that disabled our product go back well before the Windows Media Player. It's just that what they were doing was more at the nuisance level. They took a version of our product and put it into one of their products last December in a way that if you uninstalled their product, it would also uninstall our product, including our PlayerPlus that people had paid 30 bucks for. We objected to that, and thought it was dirty pool, but we did not think that was the kind of issue [where] they would just say, "That's a bug."
We were really torn on a couple of levels. On one level, we were still talking to them: "Is there a way you can write your software so it doesn't disable our product? If you are not able to play our clips, could you point users to where they could get an updated version of our product?"
They told us, "No, we don't want to do that."
I had another meeting, with another even more senior person. We tried to be polite and friendly. For whatever reason, if we'd had it in a meat locker, it would have been warmer.
It was clear that there was no point [where we could] get them to say, "Here's our written policy for disabling other people's products. Here's when we think we should do it; here's when we don't." If they'd put in it writing, we could have appealed to a higher authority. But there was a sense of, "We'll do what we want to do."
We certainly had no specific plan to go public with the issue. We were still hoping to resolve it. It didn't seem to be a beneficial thing to raise it publicly.
Then Senator Hatch called me. I guess his staff had felt a little frustrated. We told them that while the discussions were under way, we didn't want to talk publicly about it, because we were trying to work it out amicably.
So he said, "Listen, you've got to testify." It so happened that he called the week that their product went gold [the "gold" version of the Windows Media Player was released on the Microsoft Web site] with the disabling characteristic built in.
When Senator Hatch called, there were two things that were notable. We had basically hit a wall in terms of being able to get anyone at Microsoft to say, "Yes, we should address this." At the same time, when I talked to him, I was leery of getting involved. It seems to me that the process of the Senate hearings consisted of a lot of issues like the Netscape bundling issue -- that were already in the process of being resolved by the courts -- or fairly broad amorphous issues that might make for good quips and quotes, but were not something specific so people can say, "That's right -- that's wrong." It would all be very murky.
I was impressed that Senator Hatch didn't seem to be narrowly grinding an ax for some untoward reason. His view of when antitrust enforcement should kick in was rational and coherent. I thought that he would do the best he could to make sure the environment wasn't too much of a circus. I thought he was sincere. So I ended the phone call telling him that it was very likely that I would testify.
With the consultation of our board, I sent a message to Bill [Gates], because I felt that on a courtesy basis, I needed to tell him that things had reached that scale. I thought that one of two things would happen. I thought he would say, "Yeah, let's talk about it," or that he would say, either because he was busy or on the advice of his lawyers, "I can't personally talk to you about this, but here is person Z to talk to you about this. I've empowered them to really look at this issue."
I told Senator Hatch that, depending on how things developed between now and the time of the testimony, the testimony could be quite different if specific issues were resolved. It would have been less dramatic in terms of the headlines, but he was not saying, "I only want you if you say thing X or thing Y." He was saying, "You're someone who knows a fair amount about Microsoft and has a business relationship with them. It's worthwhile for you to come talk to us, because we want to get to the bottom of what this is like."
When Bill basically said that it didn't make sense to meet, and didn't offer any alternative, that cast the die.
