Rob Glaser (pictured here) called BoomTown when he landed in Washington, D.C., only a few hours after he announced Wednesday he was stepping down as longtime CEO of RealNetworks (RNWK).

Digital Daily reported there was some contention between Glaser and the Real board around his departure from the Seattle-based company he founded 16 years ago, a move that has actually been in the works for some time.

While Glaser did say that he had been through the “most intense two weeks of my life,” leading up to that, he declined to comment more about the specifics of his leaving.

That was fine with me, because–although execs come and go in various and sundry ways–you simply have to give Glaser credit for his pioneering work in bringing both audio and video to the Web.

So Glaser and I talked about this and more, from what he thinks are the key highlights of his Internet career until now to what he plans to do next.

First and foremost, Glaser did “give the Internet a voice,” as I wrote in a 1998 profile of him for The Wall Street Journal about his company’s introduction of its first RealAudio product:

“RealAudio was greeted with more than a little disdain from the Internet elite because it was a tinny and unsatisfying experience for most users. But it gave the Internet a voice, and Mr. Glaser kept plugging away, improving fidelity and striking deals with more content providers to use it on their Web sites.”

Glaser said that was the simple idea behind Real, to “turn the Web from text and static links to a dynamic media space for the mainstream to enjoy.”

That effort began in earnest in the mid-1990s, he noted, by selling “tech enablement,” which simply meant hawking servers and software to companies interested in adding audio and, later, video, to their Web sites.

So successful was Real then that many big companies tried to buy it for huge sums. But ever the aggressive entrepreneur, Glaser never sold–unlike Mark Cuban at Broadcast.com–although many wished he had.

But that was simply not his style, he said; plus, business was booming and it was “like selling pickaxes during the Gold Rush.”

It is an apt metaphor since the next major moment for the company came when the Web 1.0 bubble burst in 2000.

“A lot of great–and also not so great–companies just died,” he said.

To avoid that fate, “We pivoted in a hard way to consumer services and avoided the tailspin,” Glaser added. “It was kind of like when the woolly mammoth evolved into an elephant, while the pterodactyl did not turn into anything.”

That meant creating a variety of consumer-focused media offerings that used Real technology, such as its casual games business and its Rhapsody music service.

Real also shifted its tech licensing business to a carrier services model, Glaser said.

He regularly tangled with Microsoft (MSFT), where he started his career as a very brash 21-year-old. The software giant targeted Real’s business, but also cooperated with the company at times.

And, while the games unit and Rhapsody hit some major bumps, Real did score a whopping $761 million antitrust settlement in 2005 from Microsoft.

But that win was some time ago, and Real idled too much, as did its stock, in the following years, even as Glaser plugged away at creating a variety of new businesses and strategies.

Some were off limits, he said when I asked him why he did not come up with a service like YouTube, given Real’s advantages in video early on, noting that his public company could never had created a service that so antagonized Hollywood partners.

But Glaser did just that more recently with one such innovative idea for a “legal” DVD ripper, called RealDVD.

Though very interesting, RealDVD hit the skids quickly when a federal judge last week dismissed Real’s claims against Hollywood studios seeking to shut down the service before it could be widely distributed.

While that specific defeat was not the reason for his leaving RealNetworks, the idea that it was time to bring new blood to the company finally gained traction with investors, the board, employees and, yes, Glaser too.

What the notoriously hard-charging executive–“My intensity sometimes manifested itself in less positive ways,” Glaser conceded in my 1998 interview with him–will do next is anyone’s guess.

Including his own.

Glaser noted that he would remain chairman of Real, although his day-to-day engagement there is now over.

“It is a big transition for me, because I am closing a chapter I have been in for a very long time,” he said, adding that he would probably do more philanthropic and political work.

(That’s no surprise. After all, Real was once called Progressive Networks, after his liberal politics, and Glaser once had a newspaper column called “What’s Left” while at Yale University.)

Glaser said that on the flight to Washington he thought about the advice Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, one of Real’s earliest investors, gave him when he left Microsoft and was thinking about his next step:

You should take time to figure out what you want to do next and know why you want to do it. Because if it’s successful, once you get going you won’t have time to think through those issues as clearly as you can now.

That’s pretty much been Glaser’s modus operandi over his many years at Real and in the larger Internet space: He pushed his vision of a live Internet forth, he never cut and ran, he never sold, he kept pushing forward.

And you have to admire that kind of gumption, no matter the outcome.

In any case, it is likely Glaser will keep doing so in the years to come.

In fact, pointing out that the movement of entertainment and content online has “come a long way, but still has an even longer way to go,” Glaser started rattling off ideas about where the online media sector needs to go in exactly the same fashion I described a dozen years before.

I described Glaser then as: “speaking in staccato bursts and radiating so much intensity that his face resembles a clenched fist.”

In other words, for all the the lively entrepreneur has been part of as a key pioneer in the development of the Internet, some things will never ever change.

If you want to see Glaser in action, check out these three videos of him, two from the fifth D: All Things Digital conference and one of him talking to me about RealDVD when he introduced it at Demo:

Session interview at D5

Demoing RealPlayer 11 at D5

Talking about RealDVD

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100115/realnetworks-rob-glaser-talks-about-giving-the-internet-a-voice-and-yes-woolly-mammoths/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090511/microsoft-mr-acquisitive/ http://allthingsd.com/20090511/microsoft-mr-acquisitive/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 18:58:48 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=17369 With $25 billion in its coffers, Microsoft isn’t exactly hurting for cash. So why is the company planning a bond offering that could raise billions in additional capital? Microsoft (MSFT) won’t say, exactly. “The company is not in need of financing,” a spokesperson explained in a statement. “It is taking advantage of good market conditions and Microsoft’s great credit rating,” adding that proceeds from the sale of the notes will be used for “general corporate purposes.” Those include working capital and share buybacks. They also include acquisitions, which, as investor Eric Jackson notes, the company could use more of.

And this is certainly a good time to buy. “To be successful in the long run, Microsoft needs people to green-light the best acquisitions and teams of people with the right skill sets to integrate them,” Jackson writes. “Frankly, Microsoft hasn’t shown it has either of those abilities. Microsoft investors don’t need another expensive aQuantive deal or Facebook investment that smacks of desperation and has questionable long-term value for the company’s shareholders. It needs to take a page out of IBM’s and Oracle’s playbook, though, and start doing deals to grow its top and bottom lines. A big debt issuance, with a skilled acquisition team, and evidence of some exciting growth-related deals could suddenly show the market that this elephant can dance again.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090511/microsoft-mr-acquisitive/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090428/why-portfolios-peers-shouldnt-be-celebrating/ http://allthingsd.com/20090428/why-portfolios-peers-shouldnt-be-celebrating/#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:17:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6766 While the chattering classes continue to pick over Portfolio’s bones, it’s worth checking in on the business titles Condé Nast was targeting with its ill-fated magazine. In short: None of them are suffering from a Portfolio-like swoon, but none of them should be boasting.

Portfolio’s ad pages were down more than 60 percent in the first quarter of 2009. If you account for the magazine’s decreased frequency–it published two issues in the first free months of the year, down down from three last year–that works out to be a 40 percent drop. Here’s how its peers performed during the same period, via the Magazine Publishers of America:

McGraw-Hill’s (MHP) BusinessWeek: Down 39.8 percent

Time Warner’s (TWX) Fortune: Down 26.3 percent

Privately held Forbes: Down 15 percent

Bear in mind that the revenue numbers for each title are likely down much more dramatically. That’s because the two categories of advertisers that the business magazines have depended on to fill their pages–financial services and autos–have all received extra-vicious beatings from the economy since last summer. So the publishers are particularly vulnerable to rate card pressure. And I’m told that luxury and travel advertisers, which had stayed relatively strong through the end of 2008, fell off dramatically this year. So that can’t be good.

My contribution to the aforementioned bone-picking: Like everyone else who wrote about Portfolio yesterday, I mentioned that the magazine and Web site had reportedly been launched with a budget of $100 million or more. But let’s be clear–that’s $100 million (or more), to be spent over a five-year period.

Portfolio was around for two years, and was gestating for a year before that, and a bunch of the budget was likely spent up front. So Condé Nast likely did burn through a very large pile of cash–the New York Times’s David Carr reports that the magazine spent $30,000 last fall to “procure the services of a real elephant to menace a model at a photo shoot.” And I’d love to know what the total actually was (for the record, I asked, and no one will tell me). But it’s a stretch to think Condé Nast actually burned through nine figures on this one.

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