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Father of DVD Gets Bitter Reward
Ant writes "MSNBC has a
Newsweek article on Warren Lieberfarb, the father of DVD, transformed the movie business. And yet his reward was he was fired."
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Hey, the church wanted to oust Galileo for his views on the soliocentric universe. Being smart sucks.
Trent Polack
www.polycat.net
they moved his job to India.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Do you suppose he's that "cubicledrone" guy who was tearing up the career-related articles here yesterday with endless tales of being fired from job after job for his blatant superiority?
>He didn't invent the technology.
>More important, he saw its potential to transform the industry.
Who invented the DVD technology? That's the news for nerds.
he got $10 million in severance pay.... if only I had such a rotten deal
- In the future, will there be a place for a "hard" medium that you can touch and store on your shelves? Lieberfarb believes that answer is no. "The future will see video on demand delivered over the Internet, and movies will be just one of the offerings,'' he says.
So the "father of the DVD" is predicting its demise. ("Father" is maybe less appropriate than "midwife" -- he didn't invent anything, he just convinced the industry bigwigs to adopt it...)If I discover a billion barrel oil field the super-major I work for gives me a 20% bonus. If I go for a powergrab they'll fire my ass. In most cases people like this do a lot of work, but there are a lot of other people and factors involved in popularizig dvds. I still like my job though...
people will always want something 'tangible' for their $$$, something to put in their DVD tower, to lend to friends, to resell if they want to, and to watch whenever and wherever. Given DRM and everything I really doubt video on demand will eclipse DVDs any time soon.
-- the cake is a lie
I'd be curious to hear what kind of case he's going to make. I don't believe there's any principle that if you make an important enough contribution the company has to ignore your generally being a prick, and pleading for Steve Case and Richard Parsons to give you your stock value back seems like begging to your poker buddies after they clean you out.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Now I've read the article, this man is far from "father of DVD". He would be better represented as "DVD pimp". Usual folie de randeur of /. editors, move on.
...to Hollywood, Warren!
"He is a consultant to Microsoft, Toshiba and others on the next-generation DVD, which promises to pack even clearer images and more features onto the discs. It could mean another windfall."
I feel like Tommy Lee Jones in MIB I, when he says, he'll have to buy the White Album again.
Once the Industry has bled DvD for all it's worth, then we might seea bulk move to the newest, standards. Whichever they turn out to be.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
Doesn't that say it all? Yo, music industry!
But hey, if we're making assloads of money the way we do things now, why risk something new?
I think that story has a moral hiddden in it-No matter how much you have achieved,you should always have humility
I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
John Ruskin
Why does yahoo do this
One can only guess what else in this Newsweek article is wrong!
Best Buy can have you arrested
I think the point of this article is not:
a) to provide geeks with another idol to fawn over
b) to provide geeks with another anti-christ to hate
I think the point is that this guy did what his employers paid him for, did a good job, raked in money for his employers, and then... got fired?
Yeah, I don't like region encoding or CSS all that much (especially region encoding, which just makes it harder to appreciate hard-to-find titles like foreign films), but chances are these were requirements this guy was given, and he implemented them because that was what his employer wanted. And that doesn't make him a tool, it makes him "employed".
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
So the manager who took credit for inventing DVD's was stupid enough to get screwed by his fellow sharks...
What about the poor shmoes who actually got the vershugginer thing to work who had to deal with this guy and probably got outsourced or lost their jobs due to the Time/Warner/AOL stock scam - I mean bubble...?
Those were the deals he had to make/accept in order for the DVD format to happen. Otherwise, we'd have the analog LaserDisc all over our Blockbusters...
Well, to begin with I can't comment on Leiberfarb's work (and neither can you it appears) as I know nothing about him beyond the article. But adding a little logic to the equations: Corporations like to have 'Corporate tools' (as you put it) whether they are or aren't anti-consumer. The article mentions he was fired when he went for more money and Time Warner let him go.
I don't know if you have some information I don't given that you just blasted the guy. The article sort of implies that he was more of a business person that got people to agree on the format. The only mark I see against him is that in the article it mentions David Boise is his "star lawyer". Of course being a standard Slashdotter, thats a heck of a mark against...
In mid-December, Lieberfarb was fired with $10 million severance. A friend at Time Warner describes him as "a tragic figure," adding, "It's very sad."
Oh yeah. How ever will he get along with only $10 million.
(/sarcasm)
MORTAR COMBAT!
Lieberfarb added billions of dollars to the company's value, says David Boise, his star lawyer, adding, "The question of how a company treats someone who has created that kind of value is interesting."
Not really. They didnt treat him any differently than they treat anyone else: with utter contempt.
"his gut was telling him that if movie discs were the size of CDs, were priced right and offered a better picture and sound than video, people would collect movies like books. The key was to make the discs cheaply, based on a universal standard."
my god, what a genius. If can give them something better, with the right price, people will buy it.
People where allready collecting videos like books.
Of course, his real accomplishment was to get everyone to agree on it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The church was mad at Galileo becasue he didn't follow procedure with his findings. Plus he was a 'in your face pope' kind of guy.
The church did create the first public observatory.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In the future, will there be a place for a "hard" medium that you can touch and store on your shelves? Lieberfarb believes that answer is no. "The future will see video on demand delivered over the Internet, and movies will be just one of the offerings," he says.
Can anyone else see the possibility of large hard disks (or their equivalent newer tech) becoming more difficult to buy retail? The googles and 'distributors' of the world will have bulk deals directly with the manufacturers, the majority will watch 'on demand' and the nerd/geek minority will have to pay more as hard disks are no longer a 'consumer item'. Copyright interests would no doubt see this as improvement, as 'average Joes' would lose the ability to store stuff themselves, having to 'pay per view'.
Thoughts anyone? Will there be a mainstream application that will require privately owned data storage, keeping data storage as a consumer item?
Not because he's wealthy, but because he seems like just one of the many high energy, ego-driven assholes who inhabit the business world. He seems to have treated his peers just as poorly as they've treated him.
Keep in mind that he took payment in the form of options rather than getting cash. Considering that a lot of people in the AOL/TW merger watched their options lose all value, he was pretty fortunate to get a $10 million severance package. He gambled and lost.
And if we cant bring him justice then send him copies of your pr0n to keep him busy.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
The key is to get other people to praise you for your "invention". Don't do it yourself or you'll never hear the end of it. The other trick is, well, I guess Al and this guy have something else in common.
The relevant paragraph:
Now rewrite that with laserdisc in there and we're making sense. not to mention getting our milestones and perspective right. Sorry i stopped reading after that 'cos the article is... long but i did check & there's no mention of it. wtf.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
As Homer is walking through a landfill:
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
What moron modded this guy up? He obviously didn't read the article.
This guy didn't invent anything. He didn't work for research and development (he was a business-guy). He didn't get fired over DRM or anything close. He was fired over a compensation dispute.
The
First, he took options instead of pay. Isn't that a warning sign? Nobody forced him to take options. He got greedy.
Secondly, he was senior management and had the people skills of a caveman. Do we want to feel sorry for bad managers who get fired? Taking sympathy to a whole new and undeserving level.
Just how many DVD's can you buy from 10 mln...
Privacy is terrorism.
And that doesn't make him a tool, it makes him "employed"
Not anymore.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
1: If they gave him the options, but didn't vest them (he can't actually exercise them until they're vested, a gottcha with most options) then there was nothing he could do, short of sabotaging the TW-AOL merger, to protect their value. If that's the case, then TW-AOL should be reamed royally with a rusty post-hole digger. He's still dumb for not demanding immediate vesting, but TW-AOL was screwing him from the beginning with this vesting crap.
2: If his options were vested, and he didn't exercise them before the crash^H^H^H^H^H slide in value, then he screwed himself for not paying attention and/or the greed of thinking they'd be worth even more if he only waitied a little longer. Sorry Charlie, but you don't have a case for that.
Of course the article doesn't clarify the point above. It's ever so much more inflamitory to say he once had options worth $135M (which was no such thing if he couldn't exercise them) and eventually had to settle for a $10M severence -- which is more than I'm going to make this month.
If the guy is good, then he's employable. He's already working again for several top companies. Don't get out the violins for him yet.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Americans have a work ethic of "Hire and fire at will."
I think that this is true in general. The US has a business culture that focuses entirely on 1) personal short-term gains and 2) shareholder short-term gains - in precisely that order. Ethics do not enter into consideration. When evaluating an employee, it's not "What has this employee done for me?" or EVEN "What has this employee done for me lately?" it's "What will this employee do for me, tomorrow?"
Personally, I believe that, if your concern is the long-term outcome, acting ethically in business (e.g. keeping employees happy and rewarded) is the best way to go for the company as well as all the employees. But this belief is not part of the culture that presently dominates Corporate America.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
...he was ejected.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
No. It makes him a tool. At best, it makes him painfully naive.
Let me tell you a little story, nigh upon 20 years old at this point. My employer at the time developed a piece of software that was leased, not sold -- elaborate support contracts and all that. To ensure that a client didn't just stop payments and continue using their copy, I was ordered to create a copy protection system that would kill the application in 90 days. The idea was that clients would receive an updated copy every 60 days, provided they kept up with the payments.
Technical problem: Most of the users would not quit the program when they were done for the day, they would shut the machine off, preventing usage metrics from being written to the disk. I would detect such a case and subtract a day's worth of usage time. Some time later, Management decided that they wanted to encourage orderly shutdown of the app, and ordered me to change it such that ten days worth of usage would be lost if the machine was simply shut off. So I did. After all, they were Management, and it was My Job.
Do the math: 90 days total usage divided by 10 days per power-off equals... An important client's installation self-destructed, per Management's specifications, after two weeks.
Guess whose ass got fired for it.
I have since sworn an oath that I will never, ever design or facilitate copy protection measures again, for one simple reason: There is no honor among thieves. Copy protection is a deliberately introduced flaw, a capacity for failure that would not otherwise exist. They are stealing reliability from you. They are stealing your rights from you. I like to think of myself as a man of good character, and I will not burden my conscience or soil my reputation by participating in such reprehensible practices. I suggest you seriously consider doing the same. It's your future, after all...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"Warren Lieberfarb. The former chief of Warner Home Video deserved a round of cheers for doggedly pursuing his vision of the new format. Lieberfarb, more than any other person, merits credit for making the DVD a reality. He didn't invent the technology. More important, he saw its potential to transform the industry. So he cajoled, strong-armed and bargained with industry players around the world to set aside their parochial interests and sign on to a universal standard for the new format."
...During tough financial times in Timewarner-ville even. And don't tell me that stock isn't worth anything. Go look up stock symbols TWX and TWTC. A former shadow of itself, sure, but it's still got market potential.
First, let's put things into perspective here: Lieberfarb is a salesman; nothing more, nothing less. He didn't make the DVD and he sure as heck isn't the father. THAT person is probably stuck in a lab somewhere getting a bigger shaft in this end of the deal than Lieberfarb on his worst day. What's more, Lieberwhatever got happily accepted his huge-ass bonus on top of his regular pay: Time Warner stock options once worth as much as $135 million. He obviously accepted it, so whose fault is it that he didn't cash out in time?? Uh-huh. It's the stock market, so accept the risks already. On top of that, he gets a cool 10M in severence. Why aren't I feeling sorry for this guy???
"Say Boss, I know I accepted that 135m in stock options and all, but I didn't cash out on time, so how about giving me lots more money it its place...?"
From every angle I look at this, it sounds like Lieberwhatsit nailed his own damn coffin. From pissing people off to letting himself get talked into unwise financial decision. And while I know corporations can be meat factories, you just don't off and fire somebody who made you tons of money unless he's being a serious ass in most cases.
This guy ain't the poor lackey under the thumb of a giant coporate comglomorate here as is being skewed here. He painted the pentagram on his forehead, danced with the demons and got his reward, promptly screwing himself over in the process. Judgement is for the defendant; One soul please.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Well its pretty inacurate to say the rich "Sit" on money, most of them put it into banks or other investments, or buy things with it. This money then goes into other peoples pockets for the services that they do. Ultimatly of course that rich person still owns the money, but they rarly keep large amounts of real cash on hand. Hell I'd be willing to bet that if bill gates could get his hands on 1 billion in cash. And sat on that money, it would seriously hurt our economy to have that much money suddenly out of circulation.
But his "DVD bonus"--Time Warner stock options once worth as much as $135 million--was wiped out by the disastrous AOL Time Warner merger.
They gave him stock, which they then rendered worthless with poor business decisions.
Being a bit self-centered aren't you?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Same with home theater. Back in 1983, There was a store down the road from where I live called "Future Tech" that was the inspiration to all us Northern Virginia nerds at the time -- half Atari home computers and half home theater (before that term was coined). In the back was a room plastered with foam sound panels, a 10 foot diagonal Kloss front-projection screen, LaserDisc, and surround sound. It wasn't that different than a DVD/big screen/surround setup of today.
Due to still being in school, it wasn't until 1988 that I had my own home theater. So when DVD/home theater became the rage in 1998, I'm like, OK, so what? The video quality is no better than LaserDisc.
Back in the 1980's we were all waiting for HDTV. Some were even holding off buying NTSC TV's because they thought they'd have to throw them out when HDTV came out just around the corner. Marc Wielage on CompuServe's CEFORUM (the moral equivalent of Commander Taco on Slashdot in the 1980's) kept trying to make bets that HDTV would not come out before 1990, and no one would take him up on it. It's 2004 and we still don't have pre-recorded HDTV movies.
If it weren't for DVD's, I'm sure we'd have digital video HDTV LaserDiscs by now. DVD's may have made the studios money, but they're no friend of the videophile.
AFAIK, the only relevant tech here is WMV, which is merely an implementation of the MPEG-4 standard, and as such cannot be patented or otherwise encumbered.
Methinks he'd be better off (read less likely to be screwed over) by talking to the good people at XviD. Indeed, if he can arrange licensing to permit official binary distribution of the best MPEG-4 codec, we could all win.
ANAM (I am not an MBA), but I've been reading some finance and business textbooks|magazines out of curiosity. [While this would normally invalidate my opinion, in Slashdot-land...]
IMHO, "seed money" has killed the American work ethic. People no longer have to put up their own money in a business. Corporate pirates are king. If someone were to put forward a business plan like Acacia Research Corporation 40 years ago, they would have got laughed out the door. Edison whored science; he didn't rape it. People no longer have to invest time into developing a company. Some other poor smuck will do it for them. As a result, long-term gain is not only ignored but also often avoided. How can you justify a 20-year investment of shareholder money? The system is rigged for abuse. Small businesses think (or should) long term. They have to develop close relations with clientele.
Frankly, I wish business schools would do a better job of teaching true entrepreneurship. If it did, I might actually attend one.
Sorry if this sounds snobby and pithy. However, like most Slashdotters, I'm sick of corporate America.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
I am kicking myself now for forgetting his name too.
/. type geek here. If anybody can remember his name, I (and the /. crowd here) would totally appreciate it.
I met him at COMDEX while I was visiting the Toshiba booth back in '97. I was in the process of writing a DVD-Video authoring system, and it was refreshing at the time to talk to somebody who actually had a clue regarding the internals of the format, and I got a few pointers from him at the time. What was particularly interesting, besides having him wander around the corporate booth unescorted by salesmen, was the fact he was hiding out in a comparatively obscure corner of the 10,000 sq. foot booth hanging around a bunch of chips and data sheets. A definite
While Lieberfarb may get the credit, it was a bunch of geeks working primarily for the founders of the DVD Forum that actually got it working, and it was not an easy accomplishment. The Kareoke features of DVD, in particular, as well as oriental character encoding (which is why DVD uses sub-pictures rather than ASCII to encode text... a good idea BTW), show a strong bias toward Japanese companies and some really strange bureaucratic design compromises. I wish I knew more about the history of DVD-Video, but the format certainly whent through several design changes before it was formally released, including some major design goals that changed mid-way through the development process. I would like to see that story fully told.
While he worked his butt off and managed to get people to come together on the standard, he was compensated rather nicely. To the tune of several million dollars -- over $100M at one point.
I do not understand why anyone thinks they are "owed" when the lose their shirt gambling on the stock market. The only way he's got a claim is if he was prevented from selling the stock when he wanted to. Otherwise he's just another formerly rich dot-bomb victim, the same as a few million other people.
The only difference is he had direct control over $100M+ of stock, not a few thousand dollars in a "retirement plan" like most dot-bomb victims.
It seems he was raising hell throughout the company over his losses, blaming the company for the damage the stock value took after the merger. Again, if he had the option of selling his shares before the merger, he has no cause for complaint.
Regardless of whether he has a legitimite claim (because he wasn't allowed to sell his stocks), you just don't get issues resolved by ranting and raving throughout the company and making an overly public stink about it. You pick the key individuals who can provide resolution and badger them, not badmouth everyone who doesn't help you immediately.
If you make it as messy as he appears to have been doing, you get fired. Period. Any company, any nation, and industry. Nobody wants to keep an employee who spends their time bitterly complaining about how they're being abused, threatening to sue, or otherwise making it abundantly clear they don't want to work there.
I sympathize and think he deserved more at the end of the day, but did not handle the issue correctly. At worst, he should have initiated a quiet lawsuit for his damages instead of ranting.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I decided to investigate this matter a little.
Often new words are formed by using roots from a single language, often either Greek or Latin in the West. Mixing Greek and Latin is often viewed as bad form. When I see mixed constructions, I most often find that the person either is kidding or never learned such a fine point. It is not a significant failing not to know, but my ears certainly perk when I hear someone reveal how subtle his or her sensitivity to language is by speaking well. It is only so impressive when someone does it without calling attention to it. My rambling assumes that I know enough myself to notice, and I doubtless do not in many cases.
"Heliocentric" definitely is the common word. The "-centric" prefix, according to Merriam-Webster, is Latin, as is "sol." Kentron is a Greek word. It appears to me that the relevant suffix from either Latin or Greek is "-centric," but all the fairly common words I found with this suffix are built from Greek.
I am not a linguist. I just like words.
Feeding the hungry is an endless sinkhole from which nothing returns. If you want to improve worldwide nutrition, support biotech companies like Eden Biosciences: buy their product, buy their stock, promote their technology to those in ignorance.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I have since sworn an oath that I will never, ever design or facilitate copy protection measures again, for one simple reason: There is no honor among thieves.
I have all kinds of respect for that position. It doesn't really solve the problem, though. Had you refused to make the changes that management required, they'd surely have fired you for that instead. Sounds like you just found yourself in a no-win situation. As you say, there is no honor among thieves.
Most people behind technical innovations that make billions for their employers don't get even 100K bonus. I think the inventor of the LED made a few hundred. In this case the fellow brokered the adoption of a single format across all players in both the media and computer industry, which is a big deal for a manager, although he did not invent the technology.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
If only he'd played Ultima 4...
Reminds me about a true story in post-WW2 Italy. Seems that a regular guy won the lottery and was now rich. The newspaper reporters all went to his apartment building to interview him. They asked him "what are you going to do with all that money?" Before he could answer, another man stepped in front of him and said: "He's a member of our local communist party, and he's going to give it to the Party!". To which the lottery winner hastilly interjected "oh no, I'm not a communist any more!"
It irritates me even more when someone like Bill Gates or some incredibly weathly celebirty donats something like a few tens of thousand to someone or a charity.
You really didn't do your homework with regards to Bill Gates. So far he's given away money in the 10s of billions to the Gates foundation, which among other things is trying to vaccinate people in Africa against various diseases. Like him or dislike him, but don't put him in with the money hoarders.
AccountKiller
let me fill in the blank.. 1:get job 2:get fired 3:profit!!!
insert witty comment here
Well, here's the thing. I'm your average Joe...Not fabulously wealthy, but I do OK. I do not give to charity anymore. Oh, once I did, but then I got stuck on some sucker list and they practically started banging down my door for more donations. I am also of the school of thought that charities themselves are corrupt, taking a large portion of donations for themselves in the form of "administrative fees", which normally involve paying some fool six, sometimes seven figures.
Apparently the IRS agrees with me on this.
If I had something insane like $10M I'd sooner set up my own foundation than give any of it to charity.
-R
In the future, will there be a place for a "hard" medium that you can touch and store on your shelves? Lieberfarb believes that answer is no. "The future will see video on demand delivered over the Internet, and movies will be just one of the offerings,'' he says. Already, services like RealNetworks can offer "Finding Nemo" online, and TiVo offers connections to Internet movie sites.
This is the Hollywood Insider's wet dream. No longer will content be owned by the consumer, rather the consumer "pays as they go". Imagine a world where everytime you want to toast some bread your bank account is automatically debited $0.05 per slice. I think the pay-per-use model is doomed. Though it has enojoyed some mild success in the cable TV business, consumers will always prefer the flat-rate, pay once model, especially when they can hold, look and feel the end product.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
" He didn't invent the technology. More important, he saw its potential to transform the industry."
Right there, in black and white. Inventing the technology wasn't important; oh no, it's *hyping* the technology that's the real milestone here! Without the hype, the DVD technology might still exist but we could've missed out on all those billions - and then what use would the technology be?
The article writer should give up the pen and see if he can't get a job as fluffer for hollywood executive types. Surely he's got to be pretty damned good as swallowing cock by now.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I see a lot of complaints here that this fellow didn't invent the technology, but I don't think people are giving enough credit for what he DID do.
First, he aligned several multibillion dollar international companies (both content and hardware) to agree on a standard. Many of technically minded here often disparage "PHB" type activities such as negotiation or selling because they don't understand how difficult it is or the nuance and diplomacy (or aggressiveness) it requires. It's tough work yet this guy's efforts at such high level meetings obviously paid off. I don't think anyone should minimize this accomplishment. It's harder than you think.
Second, it's often vision that is much more important that technology. It's really easy to think of the next evolution of a product, to make it faster, or cheaper, but it's difficult to see the next "revolution", especially the business model that comes with it. Again, this is one of those Slashdot things that gets ridiculed to Underpants Gnomes references--it's simply not as obvious as "3. Profit!". Finding the use or market for a technology is as tough as creating the technology itself. Often, it's harder, especially to make the link to established markets or models. This fellow figured out a way to make money off of DVD and to revive a sagging distribution channel.
Interesting point, but your example could be better. Bill Gates has actually given $23 Billion to charity, more than half of his worth.
My guess would be that the majority of what's left of his fortune is tied up in Microsoft stock, and by keeping it invested, he's left the door open to making even bigger charitable donations in future.
Still, the point is almost certainly true for other rich people as well.
In which case he can burn in hell ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
While the I.T. talent in India cannot be denied, they have reached saturation point for outsourced work. Anyone jumping on the gravytrain now is being sold a lie.
The greedy corporations who rush to dump their loyal staff so they can post profits of 110 mill rather than 95 mill, deserve to get Dheli belly when it all goes tits up.