Even if millions of people hadn't spent Monday using Rob Glaser's technology to watch President Clinton squirm, the founder of RealNetworks would have had an intense year.
This summer, for example, Glaser told a Senate committee that Microsoft might deliberately have prevented his company's new RealSystem G2 software from working properly on Windows systems, a charge Microsoft denied. In the end, a third party determined that technical mistakes by both companies contributed to the problem.
The buzz over Glaser's company grew louder last week with the news that RealNetworks (RNWK) had inked a deal with Intel to license Intel's video-compression technology for its new G2 player.
Glaser pioneered streaming media on the Web, forming the bridge between broadcast and plain text. His inventions, RealAudio and RealVideo, are now so widely used and adopted that they have become fundamental to our experience of today's Internet.
In this, the first segment of a two-part interview, Wired News talks with Glaser about what led him to his vision of the Net as a democratic broadcast medium and about the break with Microsoft, his former employer.
Wired News: I'd like to go back and look at the formative experiences that led you to become the guy to popularize decentralized audio and video media on the Net. In high school, you and your friends created a pirate radio station.
Rob Glaser: When I think about my psyche, and how I connected media with things that were important to me, I think of two things. In third grade, [my class] went on this field trip to a park which had been used by Native Americans. There were caves there and we went to see if we could find any artifacts. [But when we got there we found] all kinds of broken glass and pollution and garbage.
Our teacher said, "We should all have a letter-writing campaign to tell the parks department about this." So we all wrote letters, and it was the biggest thrill that not only did the parks commissioner write a letter back, but in his letter, he quoted from my letter describing the situation, and why it was so disturbing. For a third grader to see that level of influence that communication could have on social change, on a very small scale, that was something that I remembered years later. It was a message that if you communicated clearly and pointedly, you could really have an impact.
I did start a radio station in high school. We didn't have an FCC license. We'd just send a signal into the cafeteria and the gym and other communal places, and it was fun to see the impact that it could have, a little technology applied in a nontraditional way. Rather than having to go through some gatekeeper and some bureaucracy to get a license, we just went ahead and did it.
WN: You're 36. Growing up in the generation that followed the postwar baby boom, did you feel any frustration that the images that dominated the media – even images of righteous dissent – were all older than you were?
Glaser: I certainly read a fair amount of mythologizing of the '60s. I read Kirkpatrick Sale's book, SDS. I was very interested in understanding how the media described, and in some sense caricatured, the protest movements. The best book I've read on that subject recently is The Conquest of Cool. It was written by the guy who did The Baffler, and he talks about how Madison Avenue – going back to the Volkswagen bug ads in the late '50s – essentially fueled the image of dissent as a form of consumption. It's a very interesting prism through which to view the unleashing of the protest movement.
WN: You had to do more than "Think Different" back then.
Glaser: Exactly. "Think Different" fits in very comfortably with the tradition of the VW bug ads.
By the time I was in college, [we were seeing the] rise of the televangelists, first through UHF channels, then through cable television. There was also the rise of very clever direct marketing through people like Richard Viguerie.
If there was an equivalent movement [on the left] in terms of using media, it was the underground newspapers of the 1960s and early 1970s, which weren't organized in any meaningful way to take advantage of new audio and video distribution. So I remember thinking about that in the context of, "I hope the next time there's a new technology unleashed, there's more diversity. If I could play a contributing role in that, it would be great."
WN: When did you first get involved in the online world?
Glaser: In college I used the Internet in pure text form: newsgroups. When I was at Microsoft, I made a point to stay involved in communication-oriented projects, because that was my passion. I was involved in a dialup modem project that ended up being so far ahead of its time that the product – which was called Microsoft Access – launched and died in such a short window of time that Microsoft still held worldwide rights to the name "Access" and repurposed it for their database product.
That was in late 1983, and we shipped it in 1985. It was a pretty cool product, DOS-character based, using client-side scripting to visualize email and communications. So you could have one mailbox that spanned multiple online services, and you could do offline news reading without tying up the modem line and paying connect charges, as well as pretty fancy terminal emulation. It was a "tweener" product, before the base of users of online services was big enough for it to be a horizontal product.
Then in 1987, I moved from the applications group to the networking group, so for the next two years, I was involved in communications products at a deep plumbing level [as in], "Should we use NTP protocol, should we use TCP/IP?" The horizontal products I'd worked on – word processors, spreadsheets – had been very successful. The products I worked on in the networking group were not as successful, because the were predicated on the OS/2 [operating system] being the wedge that was going to be the lead for Microsoft's entry into the networking business. OS/2, instead of being a wedge, ended up being a boat anchor. But their underlying strategy of using a general-purpose operating system as a server was something that worked very well for Microsoft, in terms of BackOffice now being a multibillion source of revenue.
WN: Were you happy when you were at Microsoft?
Glaser: Longitudinally, yes. Would I have stayed 10 years otherwise? There were a number of contributing factors in my decision to leave. One was the center of what I was always interested in: the nexus of media and communications and digital technology. The center of what Microsoft was interested in has always been the computer itself.
While Microsoft has had good success in better network applications, like client-server databases, Microsoft has never been a media or communications-centered company. If you look at the results Microsoft has achieved on its interactive media side, and how it's organized off to the side – it never felt deeply integrated.
There were a number at people I knew at Microsoft who prided themselves on not watching television, because they found it a distraction. To me, that's a perfectly valid opinion, and it may even be – from a child-rearing standpoint – a superior way of looking at the world. But if you want to be in the media business, there's no substitute for having a gut feeling for what the medium is.
I loved Microsoft when Microsoft was David and IBM was Goliath. I came to feel that the same approach was not as appropriate when David slayed Goliath and became the Goliath itself.
