RealNames CEO Talks Back

jasoncart writes: "Keith Teare, former CEO of RealNames, has updated his homepage with his opinions regarding his the companies downfall. Obviously he's annoyed as he has lost his job, but he makes some good points about Microsoft's monopoly - 'Microsoft seems to be playing the role of the referee who decides whether any innovations succeed'"

Comments

Sour Grapes...

[fleeb_fantastique]

This all sounds like sour grapes to me.

Not that I blame him, and not that he's not completely without merit here, but I don't really think RealNames had a viable product to begin with (as several of the comments last time suggested).

If anything, I think this company failed to adapt to changes in technologies.

Obsolete technology

[Animats]

Now that search engines are fast and cheap, paid keyword systems aren't needed. It's an idea that was overtaken by better technology.

If search wasn't so cheap that companies compete to give it away, we'd need something like this. But we don't.

Re:Obsolete technology

[kteare]

The limits of the Domain Name System are connected to its roots as a naming architecture invented in 1984, with the primary purpose of giving names to networks and to people as endpoints in email services. The network has changed dramatically since then. DNS's main weaknesses include:
a) DNS is only able to make use of 7 bit ASCII - 26 characters in the English alphabet and the 10 in the numerical system, 0-9, plus the hyphen (37 total characters), in forming a name. 7 bit ASCII cannot handle foreign characters, creating a significant problem for languages with non-Roman scripts.
b) DNS cannot guarantee quality of service in delivering content. A DNS resolution points a user to a physical resource and is at the mercy of bandwidth constraints and traffic peaks.
c) DNS is a poor global naming system. A company with multiple sites worldwide has to give each of them different names [ibm.com; ibm.co.uk etc].
d) DNS has no inbuilt reporting capabilities. In fact, reporting on DNS traffic is so complex and essential that an industry has arisen to provide the imperfect reports that are available today.

URIs and URLs have weaknesses as well:

a) DNS gave birth to the URI. These long strings - again restricted to ASCII - allow naming of a wider set of resources. The URI can address individual web pages (with URLs), but the URI can also address people's email address - as in mailto:person@company.com - and even their phone number - as in phoneto:16504865555.
b) The URI is a major breakthrough as a means of addressing an unlimited number and type of resources on the Internet, but it is not a naming system. Rather it is a physical addressing system. Naming systems match a physical resource with an alias. A phone number, for example, is simply a memorable (one hopes!) alias to a physical switch address. A DNS name is an alias to an IP number. Physical addresses that are also forced to play the role of names are a bad idea because an identity is then tied to a physical resource identifier. If the resource moves or changes, the name will break. No persistent naming system for the Web was built, and the URL was adopted as the only available alternative. This is widely accepted to be a huge error.
c) In addition, the URI is incapable of being human friendly. Home page URLs for well known things barely pass muster as human friendly, intuitive identifiers. http://www.coke.com is OK, but how could one expect to intuitively understand that the URL for the US Fish and Wildlife Service is http://www.fws.gov.
d) URLs cannot be consistent pointers to all content across all network access devices Wireless URLs and Web URLs point to different versions of content.
e) The URL, like DNS, cannot use non-ASCII characters, although it can use a wider set of ASCII characters than the DNS. Limitations in DNS and URIs spawned search engines - which compensate for the lack of a manageable, human friendly naming architecture for network resources.

While they solve a specific and relevant problem, search engines also have weaknesses:
a) Search Engines can only index "static" web pages on the public network. These are pages with a physical existence on a web server. Today less than 25% of web pages are "static". Search engines cannot provide pointers to protected content. Similarly, search engines cannot provide access to dynamic content that is refreshed frequently, or content that resides in a content management server or searchable database.
b) Search Engines employ a "full text index" approach to content. Even with algorithms which attempt to elevate one site above another based on relevance rankings, search engines inevitably find it hard to distinguish between a home page for an entity [a company, a product, a famous person] and a reference to that entity by a third party. Search is great for research but of limited value for navigation.

Playing the game

[SWroclawski]

When you play the game of working with powerful monpoloies who are known to destroy companies and to unlawfully use thier influence, you should not be any more surprised about them doing the same to you than you would be if you took a canibal to you to a desert island.

That's especially true when a well used and Free alternative to your product exists and is in wide use.

- Serge Wroclawski

Whine whine whine

[rufusdufus]

Their business plan was to make money off Microsoft. They failed to please their primary client and lost their business. Now they are out of business.

Now they are blaming Microsoft for their own short sightedness.

Microsoft has no obligation to keep these people in business just for the sake of keeping them in jobs.

Their weird naming standards didn't make much sense in the first place, with the crash of the .COMs, its just silly.

bullshit.

[geektweaked.com]

calling realnames an "innovation" is a bit of a stretch.

all realnames had was a database that paired together words with webaddresses. this is not innovation. this is novelty at best. save me the sob story about monopolies and start working on real innovation. had it not been for the monopoly of microsoft, realnames would never have gained any kind of recognition in the first place.

-c

so let me get this straight...

[ostiguy]

he built a company whose product/service apparently was not internet based (meaning, using standards like dns, etc), and rather, was wholy dependent upon just *one* other vendor's platform/service to such an extreme that users couldn't install it upon that platform/service themselves as it was simply guaranteed to be integrated for a fixed time period. We are supposed to feel bad because his company didn't have a contigency plan? They never thought about writing a plug in that would allow them to operate immediately for other browsers, and possible as a contigency in case of a falling out with MS?

No one would feel sorry for a hardware vendor that made hardware that would only work for Dells, and then went other because kingston/micron/western digital, etc could do it for less, and Dell went with them when it was time to renegotiate the contract.

ostiguy

This reminds me of Loki Games

[zyklone]

Sounds pretty much like what happened to Loki Games.

Contracts written during the boom which returns to kill the company now. I wonder how many of the dotcoms died because of that kind of deals.

I'm with Microsoft on this one

[dangermouse]

Microsoft is right. The path to better navigability of the web does lie through searching, not through naming. The namespace is inherently very limited and cannot cope in any reasonable manner with the sheer volume of information that is available on the Web. What are needed are indices, and they need to take into account the content of documents, not simply their locations.

When I want to find RandomCo online, unless they're a seriously huge company I don't just guess at randomco.com. That's not reliable enough. I've also long since ceased to visit directory sites to look up RandomCo. What I do instead is go to Google, type in "RandomCo RandomProduct" and find it immediately. This is infinitely more applicable to documents that are not sponsored by huge corporations, given the corporate dominance and limited range of the DNS hierarchy.

RealNames didn't even have a shot without Microsoft's dominance of the browser market, so Teare's parting shots at Microsoft (while very accurate) smack of hypocrisy. Dollars to doughnuts RealNames loved the fact that there was a single company to deal with in their bid to propagate their technology.

They didn't have much of a business plan

[reparteeist]

If he truly believed his product was ground-breaking cutting-edge technology, he should have partnered with other companies as well. Depending on Microsoft as your only partner does not make good business sense. Had he made deals with other vendors, RealNames would have some source of capital to fall back on. But since he suicided by depending on Microsoft, his company is now no more.

Realnames former CEO is a whining little bitch

[Beatlebum]

If MSFT decides not to renew their contract with Realnames that's their business. If Realnames had any intellectual property worth a damn someone else would step in. The fact is Google has made Realnames' technology irrelevent. This dude is just pissed because he wasn't able to IPO his shitty company and make bank before the bubble burst.

jep, typical M$

[sheean.nl]

Now, Bill Bliss - who runs MSN Search and was until recently in charge of the RealNames relationship, has in the last few weeks been moved to "Natural Language Platforms" and is charged with developing a variant of our system. The browser is now back under Microsoft's control and it is possible that - having learned much from RealNames - it will develop its own version of our resolution service.

seems, nomather how bad the company may be, quite unfair to me. And this quite confirm one of my previous postings (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32467&cid=350 5128).

Live by the sword, die by the sword

[A nonymous Coward]

Not much real sympathy from me. Apparently he only thinks M$ is a greedy monopolist now that he himself has been screwed. Doesn't seem to have complained when M$ was raping Netscape, Staq, Novell, ... I guess as long as he was getting along with the wolf, getting a few crumbs that fell off the table, no complaints.

Nope, not much sympathy from me.

A friend's idea for a startup 5 years ago never got off the ground because at least two vulture capitalists refused to fund, on the grounds that if it became sucessful, M$ would jump in, make an offer we would be literally fools to refuse, and the VCs would not get enough return on their investment. I had long since been avoiding anything M$, just because of their nonethics attitude, and the friend was a real M$ junkie. Woke him up a bit. Maybe Teare will wake up a bit. Maybe others will wake up a bit.

Dot Com Whining

[dj28]

Why _should_ Microsoft renew a contract with RealName? I still don't understand it. In this free market, if a company feels like it can do better by itself rather than contract work out, why should it contract the work out? On that guy's homepage, he talks as if it is RealName's _right_ for MSN to use their service. Maybe they want their own keyword system, or they feel that it is inferior. To tell you honestly, it's a pretty stupid concept anyways and I don't see the future of the internet going toward that paradigm. There are lots of dot coms whining about their right for other companies to use their service. If RealName didn't have much of a business model (which they didn't), how can they survive? And MSN's justification is correct; the internet is moving toward a Google type system, not a "keyword" type system. AOL already provides a service like RealName did and it only works well if you have ownership of the browsing software. RealName didn't own IE, so it was prone to getting left out in the rain like it did. They should have saw this coming.

So let me get this straight....

[wo1verin3]

1) Party enters in to agreement with MicroSloth
2) Party can not pay Microsloth what they agreed to and provides a note
3) Party proposes alternate options to original agreement and MicroSloth decides against the agreement because it is not financially appealing in the long run

Hrm...they made what seems like a smart business decision without breaking any law or taking advantage of any loophole.

I don't see the issue.

Technology?

[cooldev]

This illustrates the problem with technology: it is only valuable if you can build something that is not easily imitated or replaced.

If you hire the ten sharpest people around and you take a year to develop something and then stand still, your competition is going to have no trouble catching up, even if it takes them a little longer or more resources. This is how many popular open source projects such as GIMP and OpenOffice are surviving. They've caught up with the real thing; not entirely, but to the point that they're good enough for a number of users.

Of those 80 people at RealNames, how many were driving technology forward? Did their entire technology consist of a database mapping keywords to URLs? Three people at Microsoft could probably do that--and scale--in six months.

The page mentioned that the Microsoft contact got moved to the Natural Language group; maybe MS is coming out with technology that allows you to type natural language queries instead of having to know the exact static keyword. Now that's technology that is not easily imitated or replaced, and it's already here in one form: the Search Assistant in XP.

I feel sorry for the employees of RealNames that have to find jobs in this economy (which is hopefully picking up!), but it is not Microsoft's job to singlehandedly sustain an unsustainable business, and based on the web page in the article that's what was going on.

One side note: If RealNames had acquired a patent on their "technology"--the kind we all love to hate--they could have survived if MS is planning on replacing it and not just ditching it altogether.

A possible opportunity

[darkonc]

From his homapage:
There are more than 100,000 customers including many well known ones like IBM, Xerox [who made RealNames partner of the year last year], EBay, Mattel - who have Keywords on every Barbie Box, and many more.
....
What can you do? Probably nothing.

I think that there is something that people can do.

Create their own name tool.

It seems to me that there are enough 'big movers' in this process that a consortium to re-install a naming process into IE is possible. Not only that, but it could be done in an 'open' manner such that the same naming mechanism could be used for IE, Netscap, Mozilla and any other browser that was interested in doing so.

Yes, this might require that realnames restart it's process, to a certain extent, but they will have to do this anyways if the company is to thrive. Microsoft is *NOT* necessary to this. They were the best way to get the process kick-started. Now that people know what realnames is capable of, it's possible to now take this to the next level -- but without any fealty payments to Microsoft.

This could be the death of realnames, or it could be a new beginning.

If realnames really wants to take on this task, one of the first things to do would probably be to create an add-on/plugin, and put some add hooks into the links created by real-names such that people know where to find the new extension. Then people at various large sites would need to put links allowing people to find the addin as well.

Time is short, but the opportunity is as large is the problem.