Slashdot | Rob Glaser Responds, Talks Up Real Networks

Slashdot Rob Glaser Responds, Talks Up Real Networks



The article is an interview with Rob Glaser, who I met once when he worked at Microsoft on the "Tandy VIS", which was just like Xbox, except a 286 processor, one megabyte of RAM, and one megabyte of ROM. It ran a cutdown version of Windows. I should write more about that some day. I still own one and it might still work.



Rob talks about why online songs cost what they do, amongst other interesting things.



When I met Rob, which was around 1992, he was in charge of Multimedia stuff at Microsoft. I was at the MS campus for a VIS conference. Gates was supposed to come by and say hi and tell us about Microsoft's commitment to multimedia (remember, this is 1992!). He didn't show up so we saw a little video tape instead where he told us about Microsoft's committment to multimedia.



In the tape, Gates kept smiling at odd times.



I was sitting at a lunch table with Glaser and I asked him about it - what's with the weird timing with the smiles?



He told me that Gates is very uncomfortable with PR and that his PR people had tried to train him to smile more, and so every so often he would remember to smile, regardless of what he was talking about.



Later, when I really met Gates, I found him the be the most charismatic person I had ever met.



But that's another story.