From http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Art icleID=25242
Microsoft Puts RealNames Out of Business... Or Did They? This week, a little-known company called RealNames charged Microsoft with corporate murder after the software giant refused to extend a licensing deal with the company, causing RealNames to terminate its entire staff. RealNames had been providing an IE feature that allowed users to type in ordinary words in the IE address bar in order to search for information on the Web, a feature Microsoft has described as unnecessary and, more importantly, one that was never actually used by many of its customers. To hear RealNames describe the situation, Microsoft stabbed them in the back and is secretly developing its own in-house RealNames-like technology. But the truth, of course, is a bit less one-sided. RealNames was offering a fairly unexceptional service that could be (and was) duplicated by any number of competitors. More importantly, companies that signed on to the RealNames services expressed outrage when RealNames' prices rose dramatically after the first year. The lesson here is obvious: Don't put all your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is a software development monster with over 25,000 programmers just waiting to turn your entire business into a single bullet point on a PowerPoint slide detailing the features in its latest browser. Everyone loves to beat up on Microsoft, but the reality is that RealNames had a pretty tenuous business to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
... when other people were saying the same thing.
t icleID=25242
From http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Ar
Microsoft Puts RealNames Out of Business... Or Did They?
This week, a little-known company called RealNames charged Microsoft with corporate murder after the software giant refused to extend a licensing deal with the company, causing RealNames to terminate its entire staff. RealNames had been providing an IE feature that allowed users to type in ordinary words in the IE address bar in order to search for information on the Web, a feature Microsoft has described as unnecessary and, more importantly, one that was never actually used by many of its customers. To hear RealNames describe the situation, Microsoft stabbed them in the back and is secretly developing its own in-house RealNames-like technology. But the truth, of course, is a bit less one-sided. RealNames was offering a fairly unexceptional service that could be (and was) duplicated by any number of competitors. More importantly, companies that signed on to the RealNames services expressed outrage when RealNames' prices rose dramatically after the first year. The lesson here is obvious: Don't put all your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is a software development monster with over 25,000 programmers just waiting to turn your entire business into a single bullet point on a PowerPoint slide detailing the features in its latest browser. Everyone loves to beat up on Microsoft, but the reality is that RealNames had a pretty tenuous business to begin with.