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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'"
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.
And so it goes.
If search wasn't so cheap that companies compete to give it away, we'd need something like this. But we don't.
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
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
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.
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.
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... Oh wait, he does.
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.
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.
Infuriate left and right
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.
Keith Teare wants us to email 'zig'? For great justice?
What you say!! Someone set him up the bomb!
-Erik