RealNames CEO Talks Back 207
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'"
Sour Grapes... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
If search wasn't so cheap that companies compete to give it away, we'd need something like this. But we don't.
Playing the game (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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
bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Realnames former CEO is a whining little bitch (Score:5, Insightful)
jep, typical M$ (Score:2, Insightful)
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=35
Live by the sword, die by the sword (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
So let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obsolete technology (Score:3, Insightful)
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.