Glaser: Harmony is the way forward

RealNetworks chief executive Rob Glaser has survived longer than most in the Internet business, largely by pulling rabbits out of his hat when the competition least expects it.

Glaser's latest surprise came a few weeks ago when RealNetworks announced it had figured out a way to recreate Apple Computer's proprietary technology for digital rights management -- without Apple's permission. This allowed RealNetworks to begin selling songs in its digital music store that could play on Apple's hugely popular iPod, which no other non-iTunes store can do.

Apple was not amused. The company has threatened to launch litigation and to break RealNetworks' newfound compatibility with the iPod, but Glaser isn't daunted.

The only plausible future for the digital music business, he says, is one in which customers can buy a song and have it work on any device -- the same way CDs work today. The current Balkanisation of the industry, where songs bought at one store only work on specific brands of devices, doesn't make any sense, he contends.

So far, the company's stand for "freedom of choice" -- the slogan of a new marketing campaign -- hasn't translated into bigger sales. But a half-price sale in RealNetworks' store, aimed at highlighting the new Harmony technology, could change that.

ZDNet UK's sister site News.com spoke with Glaser late on Monday about the company's vision of a Rosetta stone for digital music and his relationship with his opposite number at Apple, Steve Jobs.

Q: Has the Harmony project met your expectations?
A: No, it has blown them away. We took the decision at the beginning of the year to implement Harmony. It really went back to some things we were working on before, where we've had good experience with creating technology with interoperability in the past.

That was with the Microsoft technology and the streaming media servers?
Exactly. We had created the universal server that streams all the major formats including the Windows Media formats. We'd seen it have a positive effect on the marketplace and we knew from a technology development standpoint how to do that kind of compatibility work. There is a tradition for it with Compaq, and actually even Microsoft has done some of it.

So we thought there's a real emerging problem here and rather than just line up in a format war, let's try to rise above that. There were some significant technical challenges in terms of making sure that it would work and that it wouldn't feel like a science experiment to consumers. [But] our engineering team did a phenomenal job and implemented something that was smoother, faster, and more transparent than what we had hoped for.

Then when it came time to bring it out, we thought, "Well, consumers will like it." But it's not particularly easy to demonstrate, because all it is, is that it works. And you know, people can already play music on their iPods and they can already play music on their Rios and can already play music on their Palms, but they can't play music that they purchased once on all three. Once we explained to people why this was a problem, receptivity was good.

Then a couple of days afterward, when Apple reacted in what I consider to be kind of a hysterical fashion, that created even more attention and visibility and awareness.

I've become friends with this guy Al Franken. He wrote a book and called it "A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right", and I kind of feel like Apple Computer is playing the same role on this that Bill O'Reilly played in "Fair and Balanced".