I know that if you have time to add such 'comments' as "it's not surprising that his answers have a high PR component to them; " that you should have time to dupe check...
Seriously, why add that? Nothing like that was added to the CA interview and the CA VP didn't anything important about anything, it was just 100% PR BS.
I wholly agree. I have to admit that after reading that comment in the description I told myself, "Ah, just more Real antics," and was about to skip the story entirely. Yet I decided to read the interview and I found his responses to be excellent. Even after having experienced so many problems with past Real software, I'm willing to give their new services a shot. I think he did a great job explaining what Real's vision is and it's very much helped their image in my mind. Perhaps some people might call that
I don't know about anyone else, but I really respect Rob's answers. I think that we threw a lot of hard questions at him and he answered each one without avoiding the issues. Even the questions which would have just offended many CEO's were answered in a very professional manor. I might have to take a second look at Real, even though I swore several years ago to never install another copy of the Real player.
I agree... especially after reading this: Well, your question has more than a bit of a "when did you stop beating your wife" feel to it, but I'll address the core question, which is what are we trying to do and how are we doing.
Most people would just avoid the question. Rob finds the point in the attack and addresses it. Now thats a person to respect (hey, you don't have to like him, or his company, but at least give him respect).
Some of his comments were quite honest, such as this one -
Of course we have competitors if we were a monopoly you would have other reasons to criticize us.:)
That actually brought a smile to my face. Well, it's kinda sad really, I remember the day when Real was new and radical, and I was so amazed at seeing streaming media on the web.
From those days, Real has come a long way - and not too smooth a road at that.
Mac users are very sensitive anytime anyone criticizes Apple, I guess because they emotionally identify with Apple as the "underdog" versus Microsoft. But for every Mac user who didn't like our criticizing Apple, there were literally hundreds of Windows users who enjoyed Harmony, including iPod users who sent us their comments...
His point on Apple users is quite a valid point - I do not mean to troll or to flame, but that is a general attitude that I've noticed in the so-called Mac fanatics. In business, volume matters, Real has no obligation to cater to the needs of everyone. When there are millions of Windows users who are willing to spend, why should they bother with the Mac users. And hey - don't flame me, I own an ibook too.
And *MOST* importantly -
96% of portable device owner said they thought they should be able to move music they bought to any device, which gives us great confidence that we're on the right side of history.
If Real were to succeed - that is what they will have to leverage - the fact that people want choice. Having to invest in specific hardware to listen to music, or trying to tie down the customer - these have failed all the bloody time. Sure, it may bring you profit for a while, but when you fall you fall hard.
Anyway, this was a good interview. Goodluck Rob. IT would take a lot of undo what Real has done in the past, but his attitude kinda makes me feel a little optimistic.
Who knows - they were, afterall, one of the first people to port their media software to Linux when nobody even bothered. So much for Apple. Heh.
While I agree with you, I'm not sure how else he can answer that question. If he doesn't say something to that effect, it is almost like he's willing to admit his company has no niche and no reason for existing. If he doesn't first disagree with the question's assumptions, his answer would look like a weak attempt to distract us by pointing out small areas where Real is doing well. Instead he tackled it head on, even if it wasn't the best move from a PR standpoint.
That question did have a 'What are you guys gonna do since you suck so bad?' feel to it.
He was dead-on in his assessment of the attitude of the question. Great answer.
I'm still not going to install Real on my computer (sorry, they fooled me once in '95, once again in '98. and I think I accidentally installed a version in '01). Now when I see a site that has streaming Real media, I mail their admin and ask if they have heard of Divx:-) and Bittorrent, rather than trying to watch it bufferi
I was rather impressed. He answered every question, though occasionally obliquely to avoid portions of the question that are harder to put into a good light...
However, I will never install Real again, no matter what media I could see with it. The company has destroyed my trust in them in the past; and while they may no longer be deserving of unmitigated loathing, I cannot bring myself to trust them far enough to install them. Once bitten, twice shy.
To be fair, their Mac player behaves very well indeed -- it doesn't grab any file associations you don't want it to, it doesn't do anything on startup, it doesn't connect to Real unless you tell it to, it's easy to configure, install, and uninstall. It's a well-behaved Mac app, in other words.
Obviously, this is rather different from some of the Windows versions, but not everything they do deserves to be smeared.
Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player?
I have no reason to uninstall WMP. It isn't annoying me or signing me up for news updates unless I closely scrutinize the setup options or putting yet another stupid little icon in the little notification area of the taskbar. Oh, yeah, and from my experience in the past 5 years or so, WMP works about 10 times better too.
He'd be a fool to respond with the same snarky sarcasm present in some of the questions that were posed, but at the same time he showed a sense of humour in his responses. His "when did you stop beating your wife" reference was bang on and yet he still answered the question as directly as could be expected.
Just asI would not expect a defense attorney to prove the prosecutor's case, I would not expect a CEO to criticise or make apparent weaknesses of his own company. However, I think he was at least forthright in his arguments in favour of their strategy, and was honest in assessing his competitive position in comparison to Apple and Windows. I found his analogy to Netscape relevant as to why they haven't opensourced the whole shop.
I'm using Real 10 and do agree its alot less intrusive than previous version. Its not my prefered media format, but I do not hestiate to view/listen to Real Media streams online anymore. Hopefully the company has learned its lesson.
I agree, they were good answers, and seemed rather straight forward.
I recently installed Real 10, and it has greatly improved, and is hardly instrusive (as much as any other program is), and it's a very nice media player, IMO.
And honestly, after this, I might look at their music store...
Go for it. Real has really made some serious changes. I'm in bed with them again and loving it, and have been for a few months. This is after nearly 5 years of not even looking at their software. Now a days, their software is really really nice and polished (both in features and appearance), I use it as my main media player now, regardless of the platform I'm on. Regards, Steve
While I don't think he was as dodgy as he could have been, I think your praise goes a little far. For instance, he says Harmony is perfectly legal, but when asked whether it would be alright for Apple to create software that deals with Real's DRM without a license, he says that they'd be happy to discuss licensing with Apple. Also he makes Real out to be the advocate of interoperability and open platforms. Why not sell music in.ogg and.mp3 then? No problem playing mp3s in an ipod (or any other DAP for that matter).
For instance, he says Harmony is perfectly legal, but when asked whether it would be alright for Apple to create software that deals with Real's DRM without a license, he says that they'd be happy to discuss licensing with Apple.
Yep, that's exactly where he lost me. He completely avoided the best question of the bunch. I can see why he did it, but it's still disappointing.
4) Turnabout? - by Elwood P Dowd What would you do if the next version of Quicktime could play.rm files, even ones with DRM? Suppose that they respect the DRM, and only play on authorized computers. Suppose Quicktime Pro were capable of creating.rm files with DRM.
Why shouldn't Apple do this?
Glaser: We would be happy to cross-license our DRM and formats to Apple to enable exactly the kind of interoperability you propose.
As has been widely reported, we approached Apple about licensing their DRM several months ago. It was only after they rebuffed those initiatives that we came out with Harmony, which implemented software compatibility with their DRM as well as with Microsoft's.
Actually, I guess it's my fault for not framing the question more restrictively. But I didn't ask whether he'd like to cross-license with Apple. We all know the answer to that question. I'm not talking about whether he'd like to see that kind of interoperability. I'm asking what he'd do if Apple reverse-engineered Real's product like Real did to Apple. Because I want him to say, "Nothing. That's ok." If he can say that, he'd win a point or two with me. But he can't say it.
The problem here is that the two cases are not comparable in the least.
I admit that there are differences. You have compared and contrasted the situations. They are comparable.
Apple would produce a file that is similar in structure to Real's format or Real's Helix DRM in order to... do what, exactly? That's right, nothing. There's absolutely no reason for Apple to do what Real did.
Real is producing files that can be played on iPods while maintaining DRM. I am proposing that Apple could produce files that can be played in RealPlayer while maintaining DRM.
They did this by emulating Apple's DRM. They didn't break Apple's DRM. Their software does nothing to Apple's Music files.
I'm not sure why you're clarifying this to me. I am proposing that Apple should "emulate" Real's DRM. I am not proposing that Apple break Real's DRM, and I am not proposing that they do anything to Real's.rm files.
Apple doesn't have the same problem. Nothing plays Real's Helix format music at the moment, which is why Real can convert their music to Apple DRM, Microsoft DRM (in the form of a protected WMA), etc. Apple doesn't even *support* portable players that are not a form of iPod, and thus have less than no reason to reciprocate in this manner.
You seem to misunderstand. I am proposing that Apple could make Safari & Quicktime work perfectly with... the.rm broadcasts on the websites for NPR or the BBC. Lots of people use that. Apple could make money the same way Real does in this market, selling software for producing DRMed.rm files.
Your perspective seems to be the Real somehow wronged Apple, even though Real didn't mess with Apple's store, music, customers...
That is exactly not my perspective. I don't think Real has done anything wrong by allowing their customers to use iPods. I think Real has wronged consumers (a little tiny bit) by keeping their.rm file format closed and proprietary. Just like Apple wronged consumers by keeping FairPlay closed.
So now Real says Apple is being a bully, while they attempt to maintain a business model 100% based on bullying. When I say "Why shouldn't Apple do this?" Rob's honest answer might be "Because we would sue them, file a DMCA complaint, and do our best to smear them as hackers in the media." (Because Real can't break compatibility like Apple via an iTunes update. Their software is deployed.)
All Real did was enable its own customers to use iPods with their software. Simple as that.
And the way they did it was by building a competing implementation of another company's DRM system. So is that ok? Why shouldn't Apple do this?
I might have to take a second look at Real, even though I swore several years ago to never install another copy of the Real player.
I just gave it another shot, and have to say RealPlayer 10 is pretty nice. I went into the preferences like Rob said in his response, and what do you know, nothing starts up any more. Just check the registry and that annoying realsched process is gone from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run. I also like some of the CD ripping features. You can rip to MP3, AAC, Real, Real Lossless, Wave and Windows Media audio all at variable bitrates. Windows Media Player only lets you rip to WMA. I just made RealPlayer 10 my new default player and so far so good.
Agreed, and I think Real *has* made some big steps recently. I tried RealPlayer 10 for Linux a couple of weeks ago, after avoiding Real like the plague since 1999 or so. And you know what? Its actually pretty good. Very simple and straightforward, no offensive behavior. Heck, if it supported all the media codecs, I'd use it over MPlayer any day.
However, I tried the Windows version and wasn't quite as impressed. Interface wasn't bad, bit of a memory hog, and it left some small process running even when the player wasn't that I couldn't immediately figure out how to turn off. Still, nowhere near as bad as it was, and certainly competitive with WMP and iTunes.
Comparing something to a turd does not make it smell like roses.
I agree. My initial reaction was "If you're only excuse is 'We're not as bad as they are' then I'll go find someone who is not as bad as you are". Answering it by comparing Real to something that people complain about too is no excuse for sucking. This is the very reason why I loathe to use Real and he did nothing to comfort my fears with his answer. Further, he didn't address the adware portions of Real that can only be disabled with some registry surgery and vigilance under windows. MS isn't serving me ads, so on that point Real is far more inrtusive.
Haha, take another look at his response to the question about the obscene invasiveness of Real Player.
He avoids answering why Real has taken over your computer by default for the past 5 or so years, insisting that NOW everything is a-okay (arguable). And then to throw keen-eyed slashdotters off the trail he bashes microsoft a little so that you forget about it. Tell me this guy doesn't know how to cater to the slashdot audience!
The thing is, the comparison to WMP isn't really appropriate since the question's complaint wasn't at all about the uninstallation procedure, it was about the invasiveness of running the program. The fact that you can't easily uninstall WMP is an entirely different evil. When was the last time you've heard somebody complain about the Window's Media Player Messaging Center popping up with ads and shit? Or the last time WMP decided that it should be the program that you view JPEGs in?
"Tried to correct them," or, "Actually corrected them?" I will admit that I won't get within 20 feet of a Real product (I'd rather install something like Real Alternative), and so I don't know how much less crap Real 10 is...
Let's find out.
1. Double-click on installer. 2. Read EULA.
MAIN BITCH #1: The Software may include certain plug-in components ("Plug-Ins"), including the ActiveX Control, Java plug-in, and RA XTRA plug-in. You may only call to or otherwise use such Plug-Ins through the use of the real
When was the last time you've heard somebody complain about the Window's Media Player Messaging Center popping up with ads and shit? Or the last time WMP decided that it should be the program that you view JPEGs in?
When was the last time that RealPlayer did either of these?
I don't know what the Win32 RealPlayer is like now, since I only use the Linux version, but if Real have genuinely improved their products it is unfair to judge them based on what their software did 5 years ago.
He avoids answering why Real has taken over your computer by default for the past 5 or so years, insisting that NOW everything is a-okay (arguable).
The question that he was responding to was too vague, but I agree that he dodged the question that should have been asked: "why was Real Player so annoyingly intrusive?" Stealing MIME types, junk all over your registry, startup folder and system tray, spyware, annoying popups, brutal user interface covering in marketing crap trying to get you to buy premium services. All you wanted to do was watch/listen to some media, and putting up with all the crap that Real installed and did wasn't worth it.
It certainly is better today - I gave it a try after the last Real article on/. The Linux install is dead simple, with no attempt to pitch premium services or install junk on your system. The windows install process isn't as good - you still have to endure the pitch for the premium player when you download, and you have to uncheck a lot of boxes to prevent the player from taking over your system. Still, it is better than it used to be - maybe even worth installing if you know what you are doing.
So I guess the real question that should have been asked is after having abused our trust with the old Real Player, how are we ever supposed to trust Real again?
Overall, I thought he did an OK job answering questions.
But in the very last question he just seemed wrong:
Having said that, we're as different from our competitors as Yahoo is from its competitors. We're focused on creating services that deliver great experiences to consumers regardless of what platform they use. This is very different from either Apple or Microsoft, both of whom center their services on their proprietary platforms (Mac/iPod in Apple's case, Windows in Microsoft's case).
It seems to me that Apple is actually very focused on the Windows platform, at least in terms of iTunes and ITMS and the iPod. Now if he'd mentioned PLAYER platforms, I think his point would have hit home a lot more.
If terms of store support, ITMS is more cross platform than any other service (well, apart from the dark horse AllOfMP3.com or Emusic - perhaps I should say "major onlne music service").
Come to think of it, I wish someone had asked him how they plan to compete against AllOfMP3.com.
Real Player 10 is really nice on Linux. I am pretty impressed by it. I mean, it has completely changed my view on Real. It just does what its supposed to and nothing else (and it supports ogg and theora, a big plus in my book). Has anyone had any issues with it? I seriously cannot find any major flaw with it. Regards, Steve
I've not had issues with it either. I really like it as well.
My guess is that the people that continue to complain about the player have not, in fact, spent much - if any - time with the newest version. A lot has changed.
Informative indeed. For some strange reason, I thought Real stopped making the Linux version of their player. Probably had something to do with SuSE 9.1 coming with an RPM of an old version (7 I think) with a crusty Motif-style GUI. More power to it if it actually plays the formats that the Xine backend can't.
I use it on Fedora 2 and it works quite nicely. I have seen one site that had Real content that it refused to play. I don't know why. Could be more the fault of the site than anything.
RealPlayer 10 on Windows too, has transformed into something I no longer need to banish from my system.
Real is trying their hardest to reinvent themselves, and unlike some other posters here who'll obviously never give them a second chance, I applaud them for it. We're all better off with a well-behaved company than one that relies on underhanded tricks, and we should encourage the former to keep it up, and encourage the latter to become to former.
The basic point is customer credability is earned, not claimed.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Real as a company seem to have some of the worst standards out there in terms of how they treat their customers.
They purposly took the most agressive approach to making money, and the least user friendly approach (ie, message center important alerts which always turned out to be about superpass combos, they used to spam me non-stop without letup, taking over associations left and right on express installs).
Behind these decisions to screw over users were people who said, make it impossible to disable / uninstall this feature.
My question was (and was rated +5 but not picked), "Until the people change, why should we think you've changed? Have you fired people? Admitted past mistakes? Will future features be honest features, or 'features' designed to make us all miserable?"
Interesting stuff to think of the people making these types of decisions...
As a note, if you ever want to know which companies take over computers in non userfriendly ways go to a senior center and look at the computers. Claria / Realplayer / Spyware paradise.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Real as a company seem to have some of the worst standards out there in terms of how they treat their customers.
Especially if, by customers, you mean "People who have been duped into installing Real's software package and can't seem to get rid of it."
I'm not so naive as to expect Realplayer to ask if it wants to uninstall every time it runs, but essentially, Real Networks lives off of cheap-shots, parlor tricks, and ignorance. I installed Real on a friend's computer *LAST NI
I honestly want to know what version of RealPlayer you're installing. Since RealOne (I guess realplayer 9) I haven't ever seen a window like what you described. The only thing I can think of is the one where you select a bunch of file/MIME types you want RP10 to associate with, and that's only if you click on "customize" instead of using the big categories that they let you use. I'm browsing through the RP10 Prefs window right now and I can't find anything like you describe, not even in that stupid Messa
Thanks for the post. We completely agree with you that credibility is earned, not claimed.
To the heart of your question, What has changed? Why would the company change? What motiviation does the company have to change?
First and foremost, our business model has changed. Today over 80% of our revenue comes from Consumer SERVICES. Services that our customers rave about to their family/friends. For example, RealRhapsody, our all you can eat music subscription service, is the number 1 rated music serice.
Glaser:
We would be happy to cross-license our DRM and formats to Apple to enable exactly the kind of interoperability you propose.
Translation: Apple should pay us for the right to do the same thing we're done to them without paying (and are threatening to sell to others the means to do).
Hello Hipocracy!
That's not what he said at all. He clearly stated that if QuickTime did the same thing as real did, he would have no problem with it. He then stated he would like to cross-license their DRM with apple. In other words, neither of them pay both of them get the other's DRM.
Read the fucking answer before you start crying hypocrite.
Translation: Apple should pay us for the right to do the same thing we're done to them without paying (and are threatening to sell to others the means to do). Hello Hipocracy!
First - it's "hypocrisy", not hipocracy. Google is your friend when it comes to spelling questions...
Second - Real did pay money. To the workers who came up with the technology and did the reverse engineering. It was not free - they just didn't pay Apple. This is completely legal - welcome to the world of interoperability. If Apple
>Well, your question has more than a bit of a "when did you stop beating your wife"
He beats his wife? For shame!
Seriously though if he wants to be sucessful Real has got to change their neferious ways of intrusive installs... As probably everone on/. knows, when your not so computer savy brother/sister/friend etc... asks you how to install real as they wanna hear some scratchy sound on the net and your response is NEVER EVER EVER install Real Player or anything with "Real" in its name... not EVER EVER. Never. You will just cause your self headaches... If you must install something, find an alternative. The Real suite WAS the closest thing legit commercial software got to being a virus or whathaveyou...
Noticed I said "WAS", and also notice that Glaser mentions some new verion of REAL... well I wouldn't know as I would NEVER (ever) download the stuff, such a bad impression was made upon me it will take a LONG time to regain credibility as a legit company.
We think it would be extremely anti-consumer for Apple to stop the music by intentionally breaking compatibility with Harmony. In the event that they do, we have a comprehensive plan in place, but it's not appropriate for me to go into details now.
Who wants to bet that the comprehensive plan involves selling songs for 25 cents a pop until they go out of business...
While I would have rather seen a pre-announcement of when Rhapsody would be available to Linux users, I thought that overall he did a fair job of explaining his position. I think in a lot of ways he and his company resemble Linspire and it's CEO.
The one fault they also seem to share is that they get geek speak, but I'm not sure they truly understand. IOW, they understand the promise of the really open market, but don't live and breathe it in their business. So they're better than many of the alternatives (like our dear MS Borg), but still aren't taking advantage of the full market they could get if they made that extra step and truly opened up...
FWIW, I've spent money with both companies in the past, and will do so again if Rhapsody ever does offer a Linux version.
Obligatory plug - please check out my online novel [blogspot.com]
Am I the only person who, when reading "yours would too if you were in his position", thought, 'Gee, thanks roblimo, I guess I am a sellout!'?
I don't see why being a CEO automatically means you must be dishonest with your customers. Is this some rule of economics that I haven't learned in school yet?
Seriously, why do all of you people get so bent out of shape? I'm honestly asking here.
If you don't like a type of food, do you go on a personal crusade to ensure no one ever eats it ever again? Probably not.
If you don't like Real's business strategy, DON'T USE IT. I personally don't like the real player, never have, probably never will. I do, however, use Rhapsody and I think it's a fantastic service for the price. But that's off topic.
The real question is why Real (or any other company for that matter) perceived as a malicious company? They are being cast as villians for having stupid business practices? Last I checked they weren't out forcing you to install the product. If it sucks, it sucks, and that's Real's problem in terms of business strategy. It's not an insult to your person for god's sake.
Yea yea, it's invasive. Yea yea, it's annoying. I get it, and I happen to agree. So I don't use or buy the products that are annoying. I installed, didn't like it and uninstalled. Live and learn.
But but but, how come I can't use it on x platform? Well, if you really want to use it that badly, I suggest you go to real and pitch a business case to them for why they should spend the extra time and money developing for your platform. Just because you use it[the platform], doesn't mean the majority of the target demographic uses it. Son of a bitch, Real is out to make money? LYNCH THEM!
If the product isn't what you want, it means the marketing and development failed. It doesn't mean they are evil. Grow up.
If you don't like a type of food, do you go on
a personal crusade to ensure no one ever eats it
ever again? Probably not.
If you don't like Real's business strategy,
DON'T USE IT.
Overall, I agree with your point. However
(always a however, or I wouldn't have
responded)...
Many Slashdotters get to deal with not only the
consequences of their own software, but with
the choices of non-geek family and friends.
I have no problem saying, "I will never make the
mistake of installing another Real product on
my computer". I know better. I realize how
invasively their products behave, the poor
quality of their media formats (until they went
to basically pure MPEG-4 for everything), the
legendarily-pathetic streaming problems (what,
they never heard of "let me buffer the whole
damned thing while I get a snack, before
starting to play"?).
OTOH, every time I visit a friend or relative,
they want me to make Real go away. I ask why
they reinstalled it, and the answer inevitably
either involves "the kids did it" or "the
website told me I had to". So, not having
installed it myself, I still have to
deal with it. That irks me, just a tad.
Incidentally, sometimes even we geeks can make
mistakes. I (presume I) accidentally left a
checkbox ticked for RealOne as part of some
other program, and it took literally hours
to completely get rid of it (A tip, for
"removing" literally any self-protective
Windows program - Burn a Knoppix CD with an
NTFS-write enabled kernel, boot it, mount the
Windows partition in question, and rename the
directory of the offending program).
I will swallow my pride and admit I screwed up
in allowing it to install. But that
sort of irritation has lead to the anti-Real
zealotry you see in Slashdotters today... A
mere oversight during installing a seemingly
unrelated product, and I lost a few hours of
my all-too-rare free time.
The real question is why Real... perceived as a malicious company?
It wasn't long ago that you were promised a "free real player"... but to get it, you had to search out the tiny, virtually hidden little link on not one but several pages in a sequence to finally get to the "free" version that would not expire in several days and demand you pay.
Of course, the non-free (as in beer) version that expired quickly wasn't conspiciously labeled as such in the several places it was displayed... so most people, even knowledgable technical people, were usually tricked into downloading the trial version of the expensive player, having a reasonable believe that they were in fact installing the free one they had been promised.
Many sites that offered videos in Real's format resorted to giving detailed explaination of exactly where to find the free one and how to get past all the attempts to trick you into downloading the expiring trial. What did Real Networks do? They regularly changed the pages, in what appears to any rational observer a deliberate attempt to intentionally hide the truely free version and dupe anyone looking for it into downloading the one that isn't free.
Upon installing either the free or trial versions of Real's player, it wasn't long ago that they would randomly throw popup advertising on the screen. Perhaps there was a way to disable this, but it wasn't obvious.
During the installation process, Real would demand the user to give their email address. The purpose was only to sell these addresses to marketers. The typical install, which is what most users select, would subscribe you to lots of junk. The custom/expert/advanced install would have a list of marketing partners.
Slashdot even had coverage of Real's highly deceptive tactic of using a very long list of opt-in marketing, where the ones that initially appeared in the list were all unselected.... giving the user an appearance that the default was to opt-out. But MANY more appeared below the visible portion and were only seen if the user scrolled down. All those others, not shown without scrolling, where checked by default. That's a pretty sneaky trick.
But it doesn't stop there. It's keep running in the background, even if asked not to. They had a history of sending private info back to their server, even if told not to. They have a history of grabbing file associations when they reasonably shouldn't. The list goes on and on. If there's a sneaky, deceptive tactic to be used in free downloads, Real has done it.
Maybe that's changed now. But they have left a legacy of mistrust that is very well deserved.
I think all the personal angst stems from the fact that most of us grew up in the hacker subculture. Programs that install stuff on the sneak violate an unspoken code of ethics. Vendors that aggressively lock in with proprietary codecs and stuff are A Bad Thing(tm). We are used to going to open forums and *Flame On* writing long diatribes about how much they suxor and why. These are the bad guys. They always have been the bad guys. They are now desperately trying not to be the bad guys. Apple and Real have been battling about online media for ages ! They were the two original players.. quicktime and realplayer.
Glaser acts like this is the first time they have butted heads.. Oh we approached apple, we wanted to make a deal. Bah that was just a show for the media. That is like osama and bush sitting down for tea. This war is in its second decade, and don't you forget it.
But I Digress........So, in conclusion, it is because we like to go onto online forums and talk about evil software that violates hacker ethics.
...when its geek mods become apologists for the subjects they interview.
As promised, Glaser answered them himself rather than through PR people, but since part of a CEO's job is to be his company's number one booster it's not surprising that his answers have a high PR component to them; yours would too if you were in his position.
If someone responds to an interview request from Slashdot, they should be required to give us geeks the stright skinny. They may not, of course, but they should be held to
He answered my question, and that's kinda cool. But, his answer makes me want to RE Rhapsody to find out what the stream is. I've heard it's WMA, and I believe that there is a player for that now; as such, if I can RE it, I'd be happy to pay for a Rhapsody sub again.
1 Apple and Linux don't have the user base to make them worth our while.
2 Online music won't drop below $.79/song until we can beat the RIAA into lower fees.
3 We use a proprietary format because if we didn't, we'd get crushed by MS and Apple. If Apple, however, figured out how to play.rm, we'd sue their asses off. They won't license to us, so we won't license to them. Nyah.
4 We write annoying and intrusive software because Microsoft does it too (and our annoyances aren't as bad as their's are).
6 Helix gives us street cred in the OS community, that's why we do it.
7 We had our lawyers look very closely to make sure Apple couldn't sue us over the iPod. We don't expect any trouble. And don't worry, you'll always be able to play Harmony on your iPod, as long as you never use iTunes again.
8 See the first summary item for Linux support.
9. Based on "independent" consultants on our payroll, people want alternatives to iTunes. That must mean they want us. We lost a million dollars in 3 weeks selling music at below-cost, so it must be true.
10. I have not stopped beating my wife, but more to the popint, our company is raking in lots of dough. We're not making any profit, or I would have given you profit numbers instead of revenue numbers.
> If Apple, however, figured out how to play.rm, we'd sue their asses > off. They won't license to us, so we won't license to them. Nyah.
This one is wrong. It should be:
We would be happy to accept Apple's check to license our useless (to Apple) tech. But we all know that won't happen because Apple is all about keeping people as locked into Quicktime's own codecs as possible.
> Based on "independent" consultants on our payroll, people want > alternatives to iTunes.
This one is also wrong. The quote was:
"96% of portable device owner said they thought they should be able to move music they bought to any device,"
Suprised it was only 96%. That question is about as controversial as "Do you think puppies are cute." Of course you should be able to play purchased music on ANY player. Which is why you should not part with good money for crappy low-bitrate DRM encumbered music.
I'm sure your cynicism is mostly deserved here (in part, I share it), but at least don't blatantly lie:
3 We use a proprietary format because if we didn't, we'd get crushed by MS and Apple. If Apple, however, figured out how to play.rm, we'd sue their asses off. They won't license to us, so we won't license to them. Nyah.
In fact, Glaser said that Real would be happy to cross-license their formats with Apple. Of course, a cross-licensing scheme at this point would be a waste, because Real would be
I've been a very happy rhapsody subscriber for a couple of years. They've done everything right. Good pricing, elegant interface, lots of additional artist information available, tight and fast performance, no ads, no spyware, lightweight, low overhead, etc. When I'm on a PC, it's playing music and never disrupts what else is going on, even with processor-intensive applications running. It just works perfectly and unobtrusively. Plus, their library is extensive and always expanding.
Naturally, when Real bought Rhapsody I got scared. Rhapsody uses WMP and Real is reportedly looking to switch over to RM. This could be good or bad. They can use a lightweight realplayer with rhapsody to send me tunes and easily add Linux and MaxOS support in the process, or they can use the current memory-consuming version of RP10 that doesn't run under Linux, and I'll cancel my subscription. The version of RP10 for Linux is much lighter than the Windows version, but ironically, they don't offer it for Windows.
To the guy who asked why there was such a problem diabling all the crap Real installs. "Install the latest version!" uh. No. Why would I trust Real to play nice?
Our RealPlayer Music Store is a pure example of the second model. As part of our introduction of our Harmony technology (which allows digital songs to play on a virtually any popular MP3 player), we put every song in the store on sale at 49 cents. The promotion was a smashing success, resulting in us selling over 3 million songs in about 3 weeks.
and
While wholesale prices vary depending on the label, today most labels charge approximately 65-70 cents per song. Publishing costs a fixed rate of about 9 cents per song. And the other costs average a few pennies per song. Thus, as we have made clear, selling every song in our store for 49 cents a song is not sustainable unless/until the labels change their pricing philosophy.
That 3 million song block sold cost them between $810,000 and $960,000.
I have to wonder if they really get enough other new sales to offset losses like that. It does seem that they are making money, but some of that money is from premium services.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Tuesday September 14, 2004 @12:49PM (#10247316)
We're one of the most active Mac ISVs around, with our RealPlayer running on millions of Macs.
Get real, Glaser. That just means that Real's users are active. The company, on the other hand, has provided years of consistent support for the Mac: consistently late, consistently buggy, and consistently slow. That's pretty much par for Windows ISVs who happen to port to the Mac. It puts them ahead of the large number of Windows ISVs who don't port to the Mac, but utterly unexceptional otherwise. I will give them credit for not littering the Mac RealPlayer with adware like the Windows version.
Now, real Mac ISVs like Adobe, Wolfram, Stone Design, they're actually active and timely with updates. And there's a host of independent shareware and freeware developers who are far, far more receptive and responsive still!
Notice that Adobe has dropped Premiere for Mac. Why did they do that? There are two reasons: First, like it or not, Windows has become an acceptable platform for digital video work, which makes it an important market for Adobe.
That is clearly not a reason to dump Mac support. That is merely a precondition to it.
Second, Apple decided to compete head-to-head with Premiere by developing the Final Cut Pro product. Perhaps they felt the need to do this to further differentiate the Mac from their PC competition once Premiere ran on both platforms, but the net result is that Apple pushed a top-tier ISV off their platform by shoving in to an already small Mac software market.
Actually, let's get a little history in here. Rewind to 1998. Things were looking bleak for Apple. Adobe had made no public announcements, but privately they were telling people that now that more than 50% of their sales were of Windows versions of software, it wouldn't be long before they could just dispense with Mac versions altogether.
It showed. Premiere 5 for the Mac was buggy, slow, and lacked quite a number of features that the Windows version had. It was, in fact, unusable compared to the Windows version. How did that happen? Who knows. But it was garbage, and Adobe cheerfully blamed Apple for it and pushed for all of their biggest customers to switch over entirely to Windows.
Would Apple have released FCP without this little impetus? Perhaps it would have. But the question doesn't arise: the need was there, and Apple followed through with it. So don't blame Apple for Adobe's failings. Apple has done enough blameworthy stuff over the years to have plenty to answer for, no need to add things that other companies brought on themselves.
Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player? All Windows does, in its own words, is "removes access to Windows Media Player from the Start Menu and Desktop," yet it doesn't actually get rid of the software.
Using that same logic, you could say "Since the driver in front of me ran the red light, I'm going to run the red light as well." Would you jump off a bridge because another person did?
Real may have gotten better at uninstalling in version 10. But why oh why are we at version 10 before the thing uninstalls cleanly? Why are we at version 10 before the adware in the "free" version (what a misnomer) is less offensive? Why are we at version 10 before the mime-type land-rush has stopped? That should have never gone into the product in version 1.0.
Pisses me off when software won't completely uninstall itself. There's nothing a good rm -rf shouldn't undo.
The one thing that makes me happy about Real is watching it succumb to the same forces that destroyed Netscape. Look at the parallels - a small company formed around a pretty innovative product. It awakens the sleeping Giant (in Netscape's case that was MS; in this case it's Apple and MS). Freaks out and spawns an "open source initiative" (Mozilla vs HelixCommunity's hxplay). Get ready to go the way of the DoDo bird, Real.
So Real wants Apple to open up licensing of iTunes DRM so they can undercut Apple on a non-Apple platform?
In other words, "We want you to let us use your DRM for our music store which won't run on your OS so we can compete fairly with your music store." Does that not make sense to anyone else?
I'm Rob Lanphier, and I'm the Development Support Manager for RealNetworks. Among other things, I'm responsible for guiding our Helix Community initiative [helixcommunity.org].
I'm glad to see some of the good comments here. People are starting to see that things have have changed.
There's been some comments on ethics, and how a company "can never be trusted again" after making missteps. It's very frustrating for me personally because it belies a certain naivete about how companies and the world works, as well as the fact that the meme really limits the potential of doing some really great things. It also bugs me because, well, I like to think of myself as a very ethical person.
As Jamie Zawinski pointed out [jwz.org], you get a lot of people together, and stupidity inevitably ensues. It's practically unavoidable. However, there's also an upside to getting a lot of people together. Some things just take a lot of people to do.
We're building out an infrastructure for delivering music and other media to a lot of folks over the Internet, and building the partnerships with media companies and technology companies to pull it off. In the process of doing that, we're managing to build a lot of great technology that we're making available as open source, much of it even GPL [helixcommunity.org]
If we're successful in really getting the industry to rally around this infrastructure, not only will the world have a kickass open source media infrastructure, but we'll have shown other previously skeptical that it's not an utterly insane thing to do. However, if it doesn't work out, it'll be yet another counterexample of why building open source isn't compatible with the business world.
It's been really cool to see how the Helix Player/RealPlayer for Linux [helixcommunity.org] effort has gone. Our Freshmeat ranking [freshmeat.net] continues to climb at a great pace, and we're seeing a lot of downloads. If anyone is worried about what's in that player, look at the source code. Hopefully, we'll be able to further roll that model of building software out to other parts of our business.
At the end of the day, companies are just people. You get a big enough group together, and you'll find there's good people, and there's bad people. I suppose you can lump us all together, and say that the group as a whole is bad. Or you can take the more pragmatic approach. Rally behind the good people in the group, and help them guide the rest down the right path.
Thanks for the encouragement. When I have face-to-face conversations with folks (trade shows, Linux user group meetings, etc) this is usually the tenor of the conversation. It's usually only when people get online that people sport their tinfoil hats come out.
That's why I'm often told "ignore the Slashdotters". While I don't let it get under my skin, I have a hard time ignoring it outright, because that's the only exposure a lot of folks have to the hard-core technologist (read "geek") community. I, o
You've pretty much proven my point. Rather than looking at a corporation as a monolithic entity, you can look at it as a collection of individuals to influence one-by-one.
I'm not going to respond to the specific grievances you lay out. I could try to step up as a spokesman for the teams responsible for that stuff, but I'm not going to, other than to say the following. Most of these things have not affected me personally, and for the stuff that has, I've spent a lot of personal political equity complaini
You've pretty much proven my point. Rather than looking at a corporation as a monolithic entity, you can look at it as a collection of individuals to influence one-by-one.
Diversion. This is a false distinction. As one who has tried the product and who has felt burned each and every time, I and many others have a valid beef with the product, and by extension the company. This monolithic company versus collecton of individuals is just straw-man nonsense.
So, before continuing to prove my point by compari
Every time a story about Real comes up, it is apparent from the comments that their past history is still getting in the way of them achieving their goals. While they are the only major media company supporting Linux, and they are doing a lot of good OSS and interoperability work, there are some that will always cringe when they hear the name "Real".
I think there are only two ways for them to address this:
1. A buyout and/or namechange. This would be something substantial to indicate the Old Real is gone for good. Something substantial like this might allow them a fresh start, although if bought out by the wrong company, they might lose a lot of the good aspects of the current company. A buyout by an OSS friendly company would be preferrable if this happened.
2. Real addresses the issue head-on, and very publicly. Draft policies that ban the tactics that people object to, and somehow assure everyone that they will be followed no matter what. Make sure RealPlayer 10.1/11 does not ask for registration, does not auto-start by default, and doesn't run any services. Maybe asking on first run or during the install whether services such as "StartCentre" and "Updater" should be run would be appropriate. That way, a default install of RealPlayer does nothing more than play Real files when the user comes across them. Nobody could complain about such simplicity, especially if there were guaranteed assurances from Real that the player would not have intrusive software installed with it in the future. I know the current player is very good and unintrusive, but unfortunately for Real, RealPlayer will be judged by a different standard than other products due to its past. Go further than what should normally be "far enough" in making the player simple.
Since the player is losing ground to Quicktime and MS Media Player, promoting such a free player should be a high priority. The player should be very prominant (if not the most prominent item) on the front page. Real can worry about advertising their for-pay products on pages to do with their music services, and other such popular areas of Real.com.
But getting the free player back on many machines, as well as getting Real to be a trusted brand again, should be priority #1 at Real. Real is doing some great things, and have huge opportunities to make gains in many areas of online media, if they can only get rid of that dirty feeling that techies get when they hear "Real".
I think Glaser should have been given a "try again" on questions 1) and 4).
They weren't answers at all. In fact, question 4) was actually the most repeated question in the forums moderated or not. It was also the most important question on many other websites [read as many other mac web sites] - as I am not sure this interview was making much headline everywhere else.
As for the answer to question 9) - shame on slashdot for even allowing him to lie like a politician and say that there was ANYthing positive out of the freedomofchoice music site REAL put up and shame on him for saying it was just Mac users, a lot of linux was mixed in there as well. If it was so positive why did they remove the comments?
You can turn all the icons off. There's four checkboxes during the install, all in the same window, and if you uncheck them then the icons are never created. This is a non-issue, although someone who hasn't installed realplayer since it was the only way to watch video on linux wouldn't know that... in other words, the grandparent poster is speaking through the wrong orifice. The college I work for uses realvideo for "distributive education" so it's part of the default install we put on every workstation. Si
"He wants Apple to let him install his music on the iPod, but won't let us install it on our Mac OS computers."
If you can find a way to install his music on your Mac he wont stop you. However no company can throw money away by supporting a platform that wont recoup the cost of devlopment. This is just sound buisness stratagy. The iPod is the #1 MP3/DRM player on the market, so they want to support it. The Macintosh is not the #1 desktop platform on the market, so they dont want to support it. Seems to be logical to me.
See I don't get this. If iTunes, prior to the release of a Windows version could sell millions of songs how can you not want to tap that small of a market that generates that much of a product?
Have you even used Real's offerings? If not, let's keep our opinions of quality to ourselves.
Apple's community is generally fiercely loyal. While apple's standards are usually high, they tend to be supported by their community even when they're not the best available option. Any attempt to create a competitor to iTunes Music Store on the mac will almost certainly be a failure unless they have something VERY special to offer, and given how similar the various music store offerings have been to date, this
Yes I have used Real's service and it's quality is below that of iTunes. I only became a Mac user recently because of OS X. So let's not pretend that I'm some Mac zealot as I'm not -- I use Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. iTunes is an entire solution. The same songs I can buy from the store, I can play on 5 Macs, sync to my iPod and listen to throughout my household with AirTunes. I cannot do this with Real's software.
And if we want to go off-topic for a bit, when I was simply a PC user I did not know what high standards for user experience were. Since moving over to OS X primarily (and quite unexpectedly as I only got a Mac to test a web site with), I've realized what I've been missing. OS X really is that great, but most PC users will not be able to conceptualize why until they use the Mac environment first-hand and in-depth. I fell into that group too. I was all too wound up with individual features and specs that I was missing the forrest for the trees and being penny-wise pound-foolish. I now spend more time getting work done and doing so more effectively and enjoyably. The interface is consistent -- most of the third-party developers (Real not included) respect this consistency on the Mac and create their own excellent and consistent software.
Note that if you do end up checking out a Mac and enjoying it, realize that your eyes will be open to things you didn't bother with before, and nothing will be more frustrating than having to worry about dependencies, or apt-repositories or compilation on the Linux platform; or ill-though-out, poorly skinned, inconsistent user interfaces on Windows. You'll wonder why you even have to run installation/uninstallation wizards instead of just drag & drop setups like on OS X. You won't have to worry about device drivers, and Rendezvous will make you wonder why the hell networking is so convoluted even today. You'll wonder why the hell no other platform offers a single, universal spell-checking feature for all applications to use. It's like opening up Pandora's box but it containing nothing but goodness:-)
I agree that this is hypocritical, but look at it this way:
1. Real getting into the iPod market provides an immediate benefit for Real (and its customers), as it lets Real reach a very significant percentage of current and future MP3 owners.
Clearly this is good for Real's bottom line.
2. Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
There are several reasons for this, including the relative size of the OSX market to the Windows market, the competition, the resources it would divert from other projects, etc. In other words, the number of sales that Real could hope to get from the small minority of potential customers that own Macs, want to buy music online, and are willing to shift allegiances from iTMS to Rhapsody is probably minimal compared to the cost of going after those customers.
Clearly this isn't as good for Real's bottom line. In fact, it would probably lose them money and, as Real isn't a deep-pocket monster like Microsoft, it can't afford to invest in projects that have little or no chance of showing a return.
Ironically, the best thing that Mac owners who would like to be able to use Rhapsody can do is hope that/encourage Apple to let Real into the iPod market that it wants, because once Real is able to service iPod owners it is more likely to go the whole hog and support Mac customers too, if for no reason other than a large percentage of iPod owners also own Macs and it's their Macs that they would use to buy music for their iPods.
Unfortunately for Real, they need Apple's cooperation and support far more than Apple needs them, so don't expect anything to come out of this: it's just not in Apple's interest to open the doors to the iPod/Mac music download market to Real or anyone else.
Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
This kind of thinking which prioritizes short-term profit is exactly what got Real into trouble before. Without thinking of the benefits of consumer loyalty, Real produced software that disregarded users' settings, which placed parts of itself in disparate places, and that made it difficult for most users to uninstall it. The result of such thinking was a backlash against Real, one strong enough to erode whatever loyalty/preference it once had in the media player market.
Fast-forward to 2004. Apple users are legendary for their brand loyalty. Any company that works in this space understands that pleasing users is the raison d'etre (French for "reason for being") of Mac-based companies.
Real claims to see no benefit in offering the service to Mac users, but for more than a year, iTMS was Mac only, and in that first year the sales of iTMS tracks eclipsed the sales of all the other contenders combined. Even in the face of this historical reality, Real says that its research doesn't lead it to conclude that the Mac market is worth going after. Maybe Real are right. But I strongly suspect that Real's music service is going to be broken sooner than later and when that happens, they will have no one to cry to except for Windows users who can't listen to their Harmony songs on their iPods.
If, on the other hand, Real had a cohort of Mac users that could (read would) complain to Jobs and company about their Harmony-purchased songs being broken . ..
Are you listening, Mr. Glaser? This is the sound that "getting it" makes. Service your potential markets, don't dis them outright.
That's funny. Why did Apple's marketshare in music downloads through iTMS far exceed what it should have given the marketshare/installed base numbers before it was extended to windows?
Why does Adobe generate about half it's sales of Photoshop from the mac version?
The answer here is that mac users are less likely to pirate software and music.
It would make business sense to target the mac market precisely since you would have lower development costs (less QA to test various configs along with free develo
2. Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
Helix player is open source and runs on linux right? It can't be that awfully hard to port it to OS X. If it's any good I suspect the fink guys will do it anyway.
But his "PR Speak" usually cancels out what he just said. Real has sued anyone who has tried to reverse engineer their codecs. Even he said he would be happy if Apple licensed their technology when the question was reverse engineering.
I doubt he will be singing such a happy tune when Apple updates kill his "harmony".
Apple isn't "evil" for not supporting other music stores on the iPod. They clearly have no obligation to do all of the work necessary to allow other music stored to store music on the iPod.
But if someone else wants to do the work, then the "evil" is in trying to stop them.
They are consistent in targetting the iPod (popular) and discarding the Mac (so so popular). Notice Linux is in that discard pile as well, unless we're willing to help them develop the stuff in the first place.
Now, I don't support the decision, but to call 'hypocrite' is just wrong.
Did you not read the part where they tried to license Apple's DRM and Apple refused? How about the part where Real would be *happy* to license to Apple? He'd be quite happy with the 2-way street.
"Stealing Apple's IP" is pure, unmitigated bullshit. They simply created software that would allow non-Apple music to play on an iPod. The horror!
maybe this is why you think Macs are slower than PCs. I won't try to start a pissing contest over which IS faster/slower in the present, but relative performance depends a lot on perception. I find most PCs slower than my Dual G5...if I had an iBook I might think different(ly). But careful with the flame of Apple when operating on a different plane than many others.
Exactly. Performance is relative, and based on perception. I said that the parent used a 5-year-old machine on the Mac side, which skews the point of reference compared to more modern PCs. That's not really a fair comparison either, is it? 5 year old Mac vs New Dell? No way.
So exactly what I said. My Costly Dual G5 gives me a relative performance benefit over most PCs, which changes the perception...cost independent. Because when one is making a decision of 1 platform or the other being faster, that'
We'd be happy to license to Apple. I'm sure he would have boo to say if they refused and worked around Real, as he seems to think the law allows the workaround.
That was one of the answers that weren't really answers. When asked if it was OK if Apple worked around their restrictions like Real did to Apple's, he doesn't say "yes", he says they'd be happy to license the IP. That leads me to believe he really would "have boo to say" if Apple made rm files run in Quicktime.
It's surprising how familiar he is... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's surprising how familiar he is... (Score:3, Funny)
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, why add that? Nothing like that was added to the CA interview and the CA VP didn't anything important about anything, it was just 100% PR BS.
I miss the old
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Funny)
How about this one ? [freedomofmusicchoice.org] Should be right up your alley.
I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, your question has more than a bit of a "when did you stop beating your wife" feel to it, but I'll address the core question, which is what are we trying to do and how are we doing.
Most people would just avoid the question. Rob finds the point in the attack and addresses it. Now thats a person to respect (hey, you don't have to like him, or his company, but at least give him respect).
This does rais an important question. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This does rais an important question. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:5, Funny)
"You want a piece of me, punk? Let me personally kick..."
Fortunately he revised.
-Adam
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of his comments were quite honest, such as this one -
Of course we have competitors if we were a monopoly you would have other reasons to criticize us.
That actually brought a smile to my face. Well, it's kinda sad really, I remember the day when Real was new and radical, and I was so amazed at seeing streaming media on the web.
From those days, Real has come a long way - and not too smooth a road at that.
Mac users are very sensitive anytime anyone criticizes Apple, I guess because they emotionally identify with Apple as the "underdog" versus Microsoft. But for every Mac user who didn't like our criticizing Apple, there were literally hundreds of Windows users who enjoyed Harmony, including iPod users who sent us their comments...
His point on Apple users is quite a valid point - I do not mean to troll or to flame, but that is a general attitude that I've noticed in the so-called Mac fanatics. In business, volume matters, Real has no obligation to cater to the needs of everyone. When there are millions of Windows users who are willing to spend, why should they bother with the Mac users. And hey - don't flame me, I own an ibook too.
And *MOST* importantly -
96% of portable device owner said they thought they should be able to move music they bought to any device, which gives us great confidence that we're on the right side of history.
If Real were to succeed - that is what they will have to leverage - the fact that people want choice. Having to invest in specific hardware to listen to music, or trying to tie down the customer - these have failed all the bloody time. Sure, it may bring you profit for a while, but when you fall you fall hard.
Anyway, this was a good interview. Goodluck Rob. IT would take a lot of undo what Real has done in the past, but his attitude kinda makes me feel a little optimistic.
Who knows - they were, afterall, one of the first people to port their media software to Linux when nobody even bothered. So much for Apple. Heh.
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:3, Interesting)
That question did have a 'What are you guys gonna do since you suck so bad?' feel to it.
He was dead-on in his assessment of the attitude of the question. Great answer.
I'm still not going to install Real on my computer (sorry, they fooled me once in '95, once again in '98. and I think I accidentally installed a version in '01). Now when I see a site that has streaming Real media, I mail their admin and ask if they have heard of Divx
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:2, Funny)
actually, i too considered looking at real again.
i'm so ashamed.
must... resist... PR...
AOLer... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was rather impressed. He answered every question, though occasionally obliquely to avoid portions of the question that are harder to put into a good light...
However, I will never install Real again, no matter what media I could see with it. The company has destroyed my trust in them in the past; and while they may no longer be deserving of unmitigated loathing, I cannot bring myself to trust them far enough to install them. Once bitten, twice shy.
Raven
Re: AOLer... (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, this is rather different from some of the Windows versions, but not everything they do deserves to be smeared.
Re:AOLer... (Score:3)
Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player?
I have no reason to uninstall WMP. It isn't annoying me or signing me up for news updates unless I closely scrutinize the setup options or putting yet another stupid little icon in the little notification area of the taskbar. Oh, yeah, and from my experience in the past 5 years or so, WMP works about 10 times better too.
Maybe you can't uninstall WMP, but I've
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:3)
Reading Glaser's answers just improved Real's standing with me. If I weren't a die hard iTunes user, I would check out Rhapsody and Harmony.
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:4, Informative)
Just asI would not expect a defense attorney to prove the prosecutor's case, I would not expect a CEO to criticise or make apparent weaknesses of his own company. However, I think he was at least forthright in his arguments in favour of their strategy, and was honest in assessing his competitive position in comparison to Apple and Windows. I found his analogy to Netscape relevant as to why they haven't opensourced the whole shop.
I'm using Real 10 and do agree its alot less intrusive than previous version. Its not my prefered media format, but I do not hestiate to view/listen to Real Media streams online anymore. Hopefully the company has learned its lesson.
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:3)
I recently installed Real 10, and it has greatly improved, and is hardly instrusive (as much as any other program is), and it's a very nice media player, IMO.
And honestly, after this, I might look at their music store...
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:3, Interesting)
Regards,
Steve
He didn't avoid the issues!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also he makes Real out to be the advocate of interoperability and open platforms. Why not sell music in
Exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He didn't avoid the issues!? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a difference between what Real believes in regarding interoperability and what the music industry enforces.
Re:I don't know about anyone else... (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm, I don't really care what type of building he was in when he answered the questions, it's the way he answered them that really matters...
Get it? Manor... ?
OK it's lame, you can mod me down now.
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I guess it's my fault for not framing the question more restrictively. But I didn't ask whether he'd like to cross-license with Apple. We all know the answer to that question. I'm not talking about whether he'd like to see that kind of interoperability. I'm asking what he'd do if Apple reverse-engineered Real's product like Real did to Apple. Because I want him to say, "Nothing. That's ok." If he can say that, he'd win a point or two with me. But he can't say it.
Re:Different perspectives... (Score:4, Interesting)
So now Real says Apple is being a bully, while they attempt to maintain a business model 100% based on bullying. When I say "Why shouldn't Apple do this?" Rob's honest answer might be "Because we would sue them, file a DMCA complaint, and do our best to smear them as hackers in the media." (Because Real can't break compatibility like Apple via an iTunes update. Their software is deployed.)And the way they did it was by building a competing implementation of another company's DRM system. So is that ok? Why shouldn't Apple do this?
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don’t know about anyone else... (Score:4, Informative)
However, I tried the Windows version and wasn't quite as impressed. Interface wasn't bad, bit of a memory hog, and it left some small process running even when the player wasn't that I couldn't immediately figure out how to turn off. Still, nowhere near as bad as it was, and certainly competitive with WMP and iTunes.
Unfortunately, to read his answers... (Score:5, Funny)
Logic, learn it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing something to a turd does not make it smell like roses.
Re:Logic, learn it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Very clever indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
He avoids answering why Real has taken over your computer by default for the past 5 or so years, insisting that NOW everything is a-okay (arguable). And then to throw keen-eyed slashdotters off the trail he bashes microsoft a little so that you forget about it. Tell me this guy doesn't know how to cater to the slashdot audience!
The thing is, the comparison to WMP isn't really appropriate since the question's complaint wasn't at all about the uninstallation procedure, it was about the invasiveness of running the program. The fact that you can't easily uninstall WMP is an entirely different evil. When was the last time you've heard somebody complain about the Window's Media Player Messaging Center popping up with ads and shit? Or the last time WMP decided that it should be the program that you view JPEGs in?
Re:Very clever indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
Heaven forbid they actually TAKE CORRECTIVE ACTION! No. Slashdot hypocrites want nothing less than self immolation.
As far as Window's Media Player Messaging Center popping up with ads an shit, of course not! That is what Windows Messager is for!
Give credit where credit is due. Real 10 was invasive and evil. Real 10 is a different animal and allows simple control over all of that.
Re:Very clever indeed (Score:3, Informative)
Let's find out.
1. Double-click on installer.
2. Read EULA.
MAIN BITCH #1:
The Software may include certain plug-in components ("Plug-Ins"), including the ActiveX Control, Java plug-in, and RA XTRA plug-in. You may only call to or otherwise use such Plug-Ins through the use of the real
Re:Very clever indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
When was the last time that RealPlayer did either of these?
I don't know what the Win32 RealPlayer is like now, since I only use the Linux version, but if Real have genuinely improved their products it is unfair to judge them based on what their software did 5 years ago.
K
Re:Very clever indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
He avoids answering why Real has taken over your computer by default for the past 5 or so years, insisting that NOW everything is a-okay (arguable).
The question that he was responding to was too vague, but I agree that he dodged the question that should have been asked: "why was Real Player so annoyingly intrusive?" Stealing MIME types, junk all over your registry, startup folder and system tray, spyware, annoying popups, brutal user interface covering in marketing crap trying to get you to buy premium services. All you wanted to do was watch/listen to some media, and putting up with all the crap that Real installed and did wasn't worth it.
It certainly is better today - I gave it a try after the last Real article on /. The Linux install is dead simple, with no attempt to pitch premium services or install junk on your system. The windows install process isn't as good - you still have to endure the pitch for the premium player when you download, and you have to uncheck a lot of boxes to prevent the player from taking over your system. Still, it is better than it used to be - maybe even worth installing if you know what you are doing.
So I guess the real question that should have been asked is after having abused our trust with the old Real Player, how are we ever supposed to trust Real again?
Problem with last answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
But in the very last question he just seemed wrong:
Having said that, we're as different from our competitors as Yahoo is from its competitors. We're focused on creating services that deliver great experiences to consumers regardless of what platform they use. This is very different from either Apple or Microsoft, both of whom center their services on their proprietary platforms (Mac/iPod in Apple's case, Windows in Microsoft's case).
It seems to me that Apple is actually very focused on the Windows platform, at least in terms of iTunes and ITMS and the iPod. Now if he'd mentioned PLAYER platforms, I think his point would have hit home a lot more.
If terms of store support, ITMS is more cross platform than any other service (well, apart from the dark horse AllOfMP3.com or Emusic - perhaps I should say "major onlne music service").
Come to think of it, I wish someone had asked him how they plan to compete against AllOfMP3.com.
Real Player 10... (Score:5, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Real Player 10... (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is that the people that continue to complain about the player have not, in fact, spent much - if any - time with the newest version. A lot has changed.
Re:Real Player 10... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real Player 10... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real Player 10... (Score:5, Insightful)
Real is trying their hardest to reinvent themselves, and unlike some other posters here who'll obviously never give them a second chance, I applaud them for it. We're all better off with a well-behaved company than one that relies on underhanded tricks, and we should encourage the former to keep it up, and encourage the latter to become to former.
Real Ethics and People (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to beat a dead horse, but Real as a company seem to have some of the worst standards out there in terms of how they treat their customers.
They purposly took the most agressive approach to making money, and the least user friendly approach (ie, message center important alerts which always turned out to be about superpass combos, they used to spam me non-stop without letup, taking over associations left and right on express installs).
Behind these decisions to screw over users were people who said, make it impossible to disable / uninstall this feature.
My question was (and was rated +5 but not picked),
"Until the people change, why should we think you've changed? Have you fired people? Admitted past mistakes? Will future features be honest features, or 'features' designed to make us all miserable?"
Interesting stuff to think of the people making these types of decisions...
As a note, if you ever want to know which companies take over computers in non userfriendly ways go to a senior center and look at the computers. Claria / Realplayer / Spyware paradise.
Real's Software Tricks (Score:3, Interesting)
Especially if, by customers, you mean "People who have been duped into installing Real's software package and can't seem to get rid of it."
I'm not so naive as to expect Realplayer to ask if it wants to uninstall every time it runs, but essentially, Real Networks lives off of cheap-shots, parlor tricks, and ignorance. I installed Real on a friend's computer *LAST NI
Re:Real's Software Tricks (Score:3, Insightful)
GM from Real responds to Ethics (Score:3, Interesting)
To the heart of your question, What has changed? Why would the company change? What motiviation does the company have to change?
First and foremost, our business model has changed. Today over 80% of our revenue comes from Consumer SERVICES. Services that our customers rave about to their family/friends. For example, RealRhapsody, our all you can eat music subscription service, is the number 1 rated music serice.
Hipocracy Translated (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hipocracy Translated (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the fucking answer before you start crying hypocrite.
Re:Hipocracy Translated (Score:3, Insightful)
First - it's "hypocrisy", not hipocracy. Google is your friend when it comes to spelling questions...
Second - Real did pay money. To the workers who came up with the technology and did the reverse engineering. It was not free - they just didn't pay Apple. This is completely legal - welcome to the world of interoperability. If Apple
He Beats his wife? (Score:4, Interesting)
He beats his wife? For shame!
Seriously though if he wants to be sucessful Real has got to change their neferious ways of intrusive installs... As probably everone on
Noticed I said "WAS", and also notice that Glaser mentions some new verion of REAL... well I wouldn't know as I would NEVER (ever) download the stuff, such a bad impression was made upon me it will take a LONG time to regain credibility as a legit company.
anyway thats my rant.
ooh! a secret plan! (Score:2, Funny)
Who wants to bet that the comprehensive plan involves selling songs for 25 cents a pop until they go out of business...
Not bad... (Score:3, Interesting)
The one fault they also seem to share is that they get geek speak, but I'm not sure they truly understand. IOW, they understand the promise of the really open market, but don't live and breathe it in their business. So they're better than many of the alternatives (like our dear MS Borg), but still aren't taking advantage of the full market they could get if they made that extra step and truly opened up...
FWIW, I've spent money with both companies in the past, and will do so again if Rhapsody ever does offer a Linux version.
Obligatory plug - please check out my online novel [blogspot.com]
Gee thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see why being a CEO automatically means you must be dishonest with your customers. Is this some rule of economics that I haven't learned in school yet?
His original response was twice as long until... (Score:2, Funny)
Whats with all the personal angst? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't like a type of food, do you go on a personal crusade to ensure no one ever eats it ever again? Probably not.
If you don't like Real's business strategy, DON'T USE IT. I personally don't like the real player, never have, probably never will. I do, however, use Rhapsody and I think it's a fantastic service for the price. But that's off topic.
The real question is why Real (or any other company for that matter) perceived as a malicious company? They are being cast as villians for having stupid business practices? Last I checked they weren't out forcing you to install the product. If it sucks, it sucks, and that's Real's problem in terms of business strategy. It's not an insult to your person for god's sake.
Yea yea, it's invasive. Yea yea, it's annoying. I get it, and I happen to agree. So I don't use or buy the products that are annoying. I installed, didn't like it and uninstalled. Live and learn.
But but but, how come I can't use it on x platform? Well, if you really want to use it that badly, I suggest you go to real and pitch a business case to them for why they should spend the extra time and money developing for your platform. Just because you use it[the platform], doesn't mean the majority of the target demographic uses it. Son of a bitch, Real is out to make money? LYNCH THEM!
If the product isn't what you want, it means the marketing and development failed. It doesn't mean they are evil. Grow up.
Re:Whats with all the personal angst? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't like Real's business strategy, DON'T USE IT.
Overall, I agree with your point. However (always a however, or I wouldn't have responded)...
Many Slashdotters get to deal with not only the consequences of their own software, but with the choices of non-geek family and friends.
I have no problem saying, "I will never make the mistake of installing another Real product on my computer". I know better. I realize how invasively their products behave, the poor quality of their media formats (until they went to basically pure MPEG-4 for everything), the legendarily-pathetic streaming problems (what, they never heard of "let me buffer the whole damned thing while I get a snack, before starting to play"?).
OTOH, every time I visit a friend or relative, they want me to make Real go away. I ask why they reinstalled it, and the answer inevitably either involves "the kids did it" or "the website told me I had to". So, not having installed it myself, I still have to deal with it. That irks me, just a tad.
Incidentally, sometimes even we geeks can make mistakes. I (presume I) accidentally left a checkbox ticked for RealOne as part of some other program, and it took literally hours to completely get rid of it (A tip, for "removing" literally any self-protective Windows program - Burn a Knoppix CD with an NTFS-write enabled kernel, boot it, mount the Windows partition in question, and rename the directory of the offending program).
I will swallow my pride and admit I screwed up in allowing it to install. But that sort of irritation has lead to the anti-Real zealotry you see in Slashdotters today... A mere oversight during installing a seemingly unrelated product, and I lost a few hours of my all-too-rare free time.
Re:Whats with all the personal angst? (Score:4, Insightful)
It wasn't long ago that you were promised a "free real player"... but to get it, you had to search out the tiny, virtually hidden little link on not one but several pages in a sequence to finally get to the "free" version that would not expire in several days and demand you pay.
Of course, the non-free (as in beer) version that expired quickly wasn't conspiciously labeled as such in the several places it was displayed... so most people, even knowledgable technical people, were usually tricked into downloading the trial version of the expensive player, having a reasonable believe that they were in fact installing the free one they had been promised.
Many sites that offered videos in Real's format resorted to giving detailed explaination of exactly where to find the free one and how to get past all the attempts to trick you into downloading the expiring trial. What did Real Networks do? They regularly changed the pages, in what appears to any rational observer a deliberate attempt to intentionally hide the truely free version and dupe anyone looking for it into downloading the one that isn't free.
Upon installing either the free or trial versions of Real's player, it wasn't long ago that they would randomly throw popup advertising on the screen. Perhaps there was a way to disable this, but it wasn't obvious.
During the installation process, Real would demand the user to give their email address. The purpose was only to sell these addresses to marketers. The typical install, which is what most users select, would subscribe you to lots of junk. The custom/expert/advanced install would have a list of marketing partners.
Slashdot even had coverage of Real's highly deceptive tactic of using a very long list of opt-in marketing, where the ones that initially appeared in the list were all unselected.... giving the user an appearance that the default was to opt-out. But MANY more appeared below the visible portion and were only seen if the user scrolled down. All those others, not shown without scrolling, where checked by default. That's a pretty sneaky trick.
But it doesn't stop there. It's keep running in the background, even if asked not to. They had a history of sending private info back to their server, even if told not to. They have a history of grabbing file associations when they reasonably shouldn't. The list goes on and on. If there's a sneaky, deceptive tactic to be used in free downloads, Real has done it.
Maybe that's changed now. But they have left a legacy of mistrust that is very well deserved.
Re:Whats with all the personal angst? (Score:4, Interesting)
These are the bad guys. They always have been the bad guys. They are now desperately trying not to be the bad guys. Apple and Real have been battling about online media for ages ! They were the two original players
Glaser acts like this is the first time they have butted heads.. Oh we approached apple, we wanted to make a deal. Bah that was just a show for the media. That is like osama and bush sitting down for tea. This war is in its second decade, and don't you forget it.
But I Digress........So, in conclusion, it is because we like to go onto online forums and talk about evil software that violates hacker ethics.
Slashdot has jumped the shark... (Score:2, Insightful)
If someone responds to an interview request from Slashdot, they should be required to give us geeks the stright skinny. They may not, of course, but they should be held to
Groovy! (Score:2)
Summary: (Score:5, Informative)
2 Online music won't drop below $.79/song until we can beat the RIAA into lower fees.
3 We use a proprietary format because if we didn't, we'd get crushed by MS and Apple. If Apple, however, figured out how to play
4 We write annoying and intrusive software because Microsoft does it too (and our annoyances aren't as bad as their's are).
6 Helix gives us street cred in the OS community, that's why we do it.
7 We had our lawyers look very closely to make sure Apple couldn't sue us over the iPod. We don't expect any trouble. And don't worry, you'll always be able to play Harmony on your iPod, as long as you never use iTunes again.
8 See the first summary item for Linux support.
9. Based on "independent" consultants on our payroll, people want alternatives to iTunes. That must mean they want us. We lost a million dollars in 3 weeks selling music at below-cost, so it must be true.
10. I have not stopped beating my wife, but more to the popint, our company is raking in lots of dough. We're not making any profit, or I would have given you profit numbers instead of revenue numbers.
Corrections (Score:5, Insightful)
> off. They won't license to us, so we won't license to them. Nyah.
This one is wrong. It should be:
We would be happy to accept Apple's check to license our useless (to Apple) tech. But we all know that won't happen because Apple is all about keeping people as locked into Quicktime's own codecs as possible.
> Based on "independent" consultants on our payroll, people want
> alternatives to iTunes.
This one is also wrong. The quote was:
"96% of portable device owner said they thought they should be able to move music they bought to any device,"
Suprised it was only 96%. That question is about as controversial as "Do you think puppies are cute." Of course you should be able to play purchased music on ANY player. Which is why you should not part with good money for crappy low-bitrate DRM encumbered music.
Re:Summary: (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, Glaser said that Real would be happy to cross-license their formats with Apple. Of course, a cross-licensing scheme at this point would be a waste, because Real would be
rhapsody (Score:5, Interesting)
Naturally, when Real bought Rhapsody I got scared. Rhapsody uses WMP and Real is reportedly looking to switch over to RM. This could be good or bad. They can use a lightweight realplayer with rhapsody to send me tunes and easily add Linux and MaxOS support in the process, or they can use the current memory-consuming version of RP10 that doesn't run under Linux, and I'll cancel my subscription. The version of RP10 for Linux is much lighter than the Windows version, but ironically, they don't offer it for Windows.
I'm not real optimistic.
Not a good answer. (Score:4, Insightful)
Digging themselves a hole? (Score:4, Interesting)
Our RealPlayer Music Store is a pure example of the second model. As part of our introduction of our Harmony technology (which allows digital songs to play on a virtually any popular MP3 player), we put every song in the store on sale at 49 cents. The promotion was a smashing success, resulting in us selling over 3 million songs in about 3 weeks.
and
While wholesale prices vary depending on the label, today most labels charge approximately 65-70 cents per song. Publishing costs a fixed rate of about 9 cents per song. And the other costs average a few pennies per song. Thus, as we have made clear, selling every song in our store for 49 cents a song is not sustainable unless/until the labels change their pricing philosophy.
That 3 million song block sold cost them between $810,000 and $960,000.
I have to wonder if they really get enough other new sales to offset losses like that. It does seem that they are making money, but some of that money is from premium services.
Most active Mac ISV? (Score:5, Insightful)
Get real, Glaser. That just means that Real's users are active. The company, on the other hand, has provided years of consistent support for the Mac: consistently late, consistently buggy, and consistently slow. That's pretty much par for Windows ISVs who happen to port to the Mac. It puts them ahead of the large number of Windows ISVs who don't port to the Mac, but utterly unexceptional otherwise. I will give them credit for not littering the Mac RealPlayer with adware like the Windows version.
Now, real Mac ISVs like Adobe, Wolfram, Stone Design, they're actually active and timely with updates. And there's a host of independent shareware and freeware developers who are far, far more receptive and responsive still!
Re:Most active Mac ISV? (Score:4, Informative)
It showed. Premiere 5 for the Mac was buggy, slow, and lacked quite a number of features that the Windows version had. It was, in fact, unusable compared to the Windows version. How did that happen? Who knows. But it was garbage, and Adobe cheerfully blamed Apple for it and pushed for all of their biggest customers to switch over entirely to Windows.
Would Apple have released FCP without this little impetus? Perhaps it would have. But the question doesn't arise: the need was there, and Apple followed through with it. So don't blame Apple for Adobe's failings. Apple has done enough blameworthy stuff over the years to have plenty to answer for, no need to add things that other companies brought on themselves.
-fred
Felacious Argument (Score:3, Interesting)
Using that same logic, you could say "Since the driver in front of me ran the red light, I'm going to run the red light as well." Would you jump off a bridge because another person did?
Real may have gotten better at uninstalling in version 10. But why oh why are we at version 10 before the thing uninstalls cleanly? Why are we at version 10 before the adware in the "free" version (what a misnomer) is less offensive? Why are we at version 10 before the mime-type land-rush has stopped? That should have never gone into the product in version 1.0.
Pisses me off when software won't completely uninstall itself. There's nothing a good rm -rf shouldn't undo.
The one thing that makes me happy about Real is watching it succumb to the same forces that destroyed Netscape. Look at the parallels - a small company formed around a pretty innovative product. It awakens the sleeping Giant (in Netscape's case that was MS; in this case it's Apple and MS). Freaks out and spawns an "open source initiative" (Mozilla vs HelixCommunity's hxplay). Get ready to go the way of the DoDo bird, Real.
And take your damn spyware with you.
-c
The support of Apple with no Apple support? (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, "We want you to let us use your DRM for our music store which won't run on your OS so we can compete fairly with your music store." Does that not make sense to anyone else?
Beginning of a dialog (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm Rob Lanphier, and I'm the Development Support Manager for RealNetworks. Among other things, I'm responsible for guiding our Helix Community initiative [helixcommunity.org].
I'm glad to see some of the good comments here. People are starting to see that things have have changed.
There's been some comments on ethics, and how a company "can never be trusted again" after making missteps. It's very frustrating for me personally because it belies a certain naivete about how companies and the world works, as well as the fact that the meme really limits the potential of doing some really great things. It also bugs me because, well, I like to think of myself as a very ethical person.
As Jamie Zawinski pointed out [jwz.org], you get a lot of people together, and stupidity inevitably ensues. It's practically unavoidable. However, there's also an upside to getting a lot of people together. Some things just take a lot of people to do.
We're building out an infrastructure for delivering music and other media to a lot of folks over the Internet, and building the partnerships with media companies and technology companies to pull it off. In the process of doing that, we're managing to build a lot of great technology that we're making available as open source, much of it even GPL [helixcommunity.org]
If we're successful in really getting the industry to rally around this infrastructure, not only will the world have a kickass open source media infrastructure, but we'll have shown other previously skeptical that it's not an utterly insane thing to do. However, if it doesn't work out, it'll be yet another counterexample of why building open source isn't compatible with the business world.
It's been really cool to see how the Helix Player/RealPlayer for Linux [helixcommunity.org] effort has gone. Our Freshmeat ranking [freshmeat.net] continues to climb at a great pace, and we're seeing a lot of downloads. If anyone is worried about what's in that player, look at the source code. Hopefully, we'll be able to further roll that model of building software out to other parts of our business.
At the end of the day, companies are just people. You get a big enough group together, and you'll find there's good people, and there's bad people. I suppose you can lump us all together, and say that the group as a whole is bad. Or you can take the more pragmatic approach. Rally behind the good people in the group, and help them guide the rest down the right path.
Rob
Thanks. Online vs. real world differences? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why I'm often told "ignore the Slashdotters". While I don't let it get under my skin, I have a hard time ignoring it outright, because that's the only exposure a lot of folks have to the hard-core technologist (read "geek") community. I, o
Re:Reap as ye sow (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not going to respond to the specific grievances you lay out. I could try to step up as a spokesman for the teams responsible for that stuff, but I'm not going to, other than to say the following. Most of these things have not affected me personally, and for the stuff that has, I've spent a lot of personal political equity complaini
Re:Reap as ye sow (Score:3, Insightful)
Diversion. This is a false distinction. As one who has tried the product and who has felt burned each and every time, I and many others have a valid beef with the product, and by extension the company. This monolithic company versus collecton of individuals is just straw-man nonsense.
So, before continuing to prove my point by compari
Still losing... (Score:3, Informative)
What he fails to mention is that they still lost 4.6 million that quarter.
Trusting Real (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there are only two ways for them to address this:
1. A buyout and/or namechange. This would be something substantial to indicate the Old Real is gone for good. Something substantial like this might allow them a fresh start, although if bought out by the wrong company, they might lose a lot of the good aspects of the current company. A buyout by an OSS friendly company would be preferrable if this happened.
2. Real addresses the issue head-on, and very publicly. Draft policies that ban the tactics that people object to, and somehow assure everyone that they will be followed no matter what. Make sure RealPlayer 10.1/11 does not ask for registration, does not auto-start by default, and doesn't run any services. Maybe asking on first run or during the install whether services such as "StartCentre" and "Updater" should be run would be appropriate. That way, a default install of RealPlayer does nothing more than play Real files when the user comes across them. Nobody could complain about such simplicity, especially if there were guaranteed assurances from Real that the player would not have intrusive software installed with it in the future. I know the current player is very good and unintrusive, but unfortunately for Real, RealPlayer will be judged by a different standard than other products due to its past. Go further than what should normally be "far enough" in making the player simple.
Since the player is losing ground to Quicktime and MS Media Player, promoting such a free player should be a high priority. The player should be very prominant (if not the most prominent item) on the front page. Real can worry about advertising their for-pay products on pages to do with their music services, and other such popular areas of Real.com.
But getting the free player back on many machines, as well as getting Real to be a trusted brand again, should be priority #1 at Real. Real is doing some great things, and have huge opportunities to make gains in many areas of online media, if they can only get rid of that dirty feeling that techies get when they hear "Real".
Disappointed in this response... (Score:3, Insightful)
They weren't answers at all. In fact, question 4) was actually the most repeated question in the forums moderated or not. It was also the most important question on many other websites [read as many other mac web sites] - as I am not sure this interview was making much headline everywhere else.
As for the answer to question 9) - shame on slashdot for even allowing him to lie like a politician and say that there was ANYthing positive out of the freedomofchoice music site REAL put up and shame on him for saying it was just Mac users, a lot of linux was mixed in there as well. If it was so positive why did they remove the comments?
Re:Missed the question period... (Score:5, Insightful)
The icons are also annoying, but the quick launch/desktop/start menu icon insertion is pretty standard for software installs.
Re:Missed the question period... (Score:2)
Re:Bloody hypocrite (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can find a way to install his music on your Mac he wont stop you. However no company can throw money away by supporting a platform that wont recoup the cost of devlopment. This is just sound buisness stratagy. The iPod is the #1 MP3/DRM player on the market, so they want to support it. The Macintosh is not the #1 desktop platform on the market, so they dont want to support it. Seems to be logical to me.
Re:Bloody hypocrite (Score:4, Interesting)
But they'll sell 3 million songs below cost?
Re:Bloody hypocrite (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bloody hypocrite (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's community is generally fiercely loyal. While apple's standards are usually high, they tend to be supported by their community even when they're not the best available option. Any attempt to create a competitor to iTunes Music Store on the mac will almost certainly be a failure unless they have something VERY special to offer, and given how similar the various music store offerings have been to date, this
Re:Bloody hypocrite (Score:5, Insightful)
And if we want to go off-topic for a bit, when I was simply a PC user I did not know what high standards for user experience were. Since moving over to OS X primarily (and quite unexpectedly as I only got a Mac to test a web site with), I've realized what I've been missing. OS X really is that great, but most PC users will not be able to conceptualize why until they use the Mac environment first-hand and in-depth. I fell into that group too. I was all too wound up with individual features and specs that I was missing the forrest for the trees and being penny-wise pound-foolish. I now spend more time getting work done and doing so more effectively and enjoyably. The interface is consistent -- most of the third-party developers (Real not included) respect this consistency on the Mac and create their own excellent and consistent software.
Note that if you do end up checking out a Mac and enjoying it, realize that your eyes will be open to things you didn't bother with before, and nothing will be more frustrating than having to worry about dependencies, or apt-repositories or compilation on the Linux platform; or ill-though-out, poorly skinned, inconsistent user interfaces on Windows. You'll wonder why you even have to run installation/uninstallation wizards instead of just drag & drop setups like on OS X. You won't have to worry about device drivers, and Rendezvous will make you wonder why the hell networking is so convoluted even today. You'll wonder why the hell no other platform offers a single, universal spell-checking feature for all applications to use. It's like opening up Pandora's box but it containing nothing but goodness :-)
Re:Bloody hypocrite (Score:3, Insightful)
Hypocritical? Yes. Sensible. Yes, also. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Real getting into the iPod market provides an immediate benefit for Real (and its customers), as it lets Real reach a very significant percentage of current and future MP3 owners.
Clearly this is good for Real's bottom line.
2. Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
There are several reasons for this, including the relative size of the OSX market to the Windows market, the competition, the resources it would divert from other projects, etc. In other words, the number of sales that Real could hope to get from the small minority of potential customers that own Macs, want to buy music online, and are willing to shift allegiances from iTMS to Rhapsody is probably minimal compared to the cost of going after those customers.
Clearly this isn't as good for Real's bottom line. In fact, it would probably lose them money and, as Real isn't a deep-pocket monster like Microsoft, it can't afford to invest in projects that have little or no chance of showing a return.
Ironically, the best thing that Mac owners who would like to be able to use Rhapsody can do is hope that/encourage Apple to let Real into the iPod market that it wants, because once Real is able to service iPod owners it is more likely to go the whole hog and support Mac customers too, if for no reason other than a large percentage of iPod owners also own Macs and it's their Macs that they would use to buy music for their iPods.
Unfortunately for Real, they need Apple's cooperation and support far more than Apple needs them, so don't expect anything to come out of this: it's just not in Apple's interest to open the doors to the iPod/Mac music download market to Real or anyone else.
Same ol' same ol'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
This kind of thinking which prioritizes short-term profit is exactly what got Real into trouble before. Without thinking of the benefits of consumer loyalty, Real produced software that disregarded users' settings, which placed parts of itself in disparate places, and that made it difficult for most users to uninstall it. The result of such thinking was a backlash against Real, one strong enough to erode whatever loyalty/preference it once had in the media player market.
Fast-forward to 2004. Apple users are legendary for their brand loyalty. Any company that works in this space understands that pleasing users is the raison d'etre (French for "reason for being") of Mac-based companies.
Real claims to see no benefit in offering the service to Mac users, but for more than a year, iTMS was Mac only, and in that first year the sales of iTMS tracks eclipsed the sales of all the other contenders combined. Even in the face of this historical reality, Real says that its research doesn't lead it to conclude that the Mac market is worth going after. Maybe Real are right. But I strongly suspect that Real's music service is going to be broken sooner than later and when that happens, they will have no one to cry to except for Windows users who can't listen to their Harmony songs on their iPods.
If, on the other hand, Real had a cohort of Mac users that could (read would) complain to Jobs and company about their Harmony-purchased songs being broken . . .
Are you listening, Mr. Glaser? This is the sound that "getting it" makes. Service your potential markets, don't dis them outright.
Re:Hypocritical? Yes. Sensible. Yes, also. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does Adobe generate about half it's sales of Photoshop from the mac version?
The answer here is that mac users are less likely to pirate software and music.
It would make business sense to target the mac market precisely since you would have lower development costs (less QA to test various configs along with free develo
Re:Hypocritical? Yes. Sensible. Yes, also. (Score:3, Interesting)
Helix player is open source and runs on linux right? It can't be that awfully hard to port it to OS X. If it's any good I suspect the fink guys will do it anyway.
Re:Hypocritical? Yes. Sensible. Yes, also. (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt he will be singing such a happy tune when Apple updates kill his "harmony".
Re:Bloody hypocrite (Score:4, Insightful)
But if someone else wants to do the work, then the "evil" is in trying to stop them.
Re:Bloody hypocrite (Score:2, Insightful)
Think:
Real/Rob says: We support the popular platforms.
They are consistent in targetting the iPod (popular) and discarding the Mac (so so popular). Notice Linux is in that discard pile as well, unless we're willing to help them develop the stuff in the first place.
Now, I don't support the decision, but to call 'hypocrite' is just wrong.
Re:Piss of Apple, wait for the revenge (Score:2, Insightful)
I suggest you google for Compaq vs IBM BIOS before you say the reverse engenering for interop reasons is stealing of IP.
Re:Piss of Apple, wait for the revenge (Score:3, Informative)
"Stealing Apple's IP" is pure, unmitigated bullshit. They simply created software that would allow non-Apple music to play on an iPod. The horror!
Re:Piss of Apple, wait for the revenge (Score:2)
Re:Piss of Apple, wait for the revenge (Score:2)
maybe this is why you think Macs are slower than PCs. I won't try to start a pissing contest over which IS faster/slower in the present, but relative performance depends a lot on perception. I find most PCs slower than my Dual G5...if I had an iBook I might think different(ly). But careful with the flame of Apple when operating on a different plane than many others.
Re:Piss of Apple, wait for the revenge (Score:3, Insightful)
So exactly what I said. My Costly Dual G5 gives me a relative performance benefit over most PCs, which changes the perception...cost independent. Because when one is making a decision of 1 platform or the other being faster, that'
Re:Piss of Apple, wait for the revenge (Score:2)
That was one of the answers that weren't really answers. When asked if it was OK if Apple worked around their restrictions like Real did to Apple's, he doesn't say "yes", he says they'd be happy to license the IP. That leads me to believe he really would "have boo to say" if Apple made rm files run in Quicktime.
Re:so... (Score:2)
The truth is, I never started either, but somehow that is besides the point. I don't know why.