Come Together Over Me
Steve Perlman keeps in touch with the colleagues he left behind at WebTV Networks, the start-up company he co-founded in 1995 and later sold to Microsoft for $500 million. He even gives them a little help. "Last summer I was working on my house in Tahoe [Calif.] when I found a solution to a technical problem wed never solved at WebTV, Perlman recalls. I sent an email to the engineering team and got a response that read: listen, we've got a couple of openings here, and if you're interested, we'll set you up with a development station and you can write code.'
Chances are good, though, that the team wasn't counting on finding their friend at the workbench come Monday morning. When the creator of interactive television walked away from Microsoft in May 1999, after tow years as president and chief executive of WebTV, the move had been rumored for moths. In earlier years, the mercurial Perlman had also departed from Apple Computer, General Magic, and other companies, under controversial, even combustible, circumstances. But this time, he insists, the parting was amiable.
Look, I'm a serial entrepreneur, and you know us guys, right? he says. We can't stay in a large company too long - we've got to be building something new. I intend to support the relationship [with WebTV], but I need to try new things.
Those intriguing new things are now taking shape in a wonderland built to Perlman's specs: a state-of-the-art multimedia lab in San Francisco's South-of-Market district. It's a digital film production studio, where entrepreneurs, start-up companies, and digital artists can make use of astonishing tools, as well as gain access to seed capital, office space and administrative support. Perlman christened his new company Rearden Steel, in honor of Hank Rearden, the steel tycoon hero of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged.
Creating this kind of multimedia playground had long been a dream of Perlman's. For one thing, he's a passionate garage and back-bedroom tinkerer. The story of how Perlman created WebTV in three sleepless nights, with $3,000 worth of parts off the shelves of Fry's Electronics, is a Silicon Valley legend. More significantly, he believes fervently that computers can create new forms of entertainment and provide better ways of bringing them to people. That was part of the reason that he created WebTV and, 15 years before that, much of the technology for the color Macintosh. But he's well aware that such technology hasn't nearly come into its own; so far, its only great success has been in productivity applications. Perlman is determined to see that Rearden Steel plays a major part in realizing the computer's creative potential.
One way the company will help that pursuit is by making the necessary tools available. The Internet, a medium still in its infancy, is at the same stage television was 50 years ago, or film was 100 years ago, Perlman says. It wasn't until they has television studios, portable TV cameras that could move, video tape and so on that you began to see television become more than just a radio with moving pictures. And in the early days, movies didn't look like movies, they looked like plays shot out-of-doors, until they began to develop new techniques for editing, soundtracks and so on.
Ten years from now, people will look back at the year 2000 as the threshold of the shift from television to the internet as the dominant form of mass media, Perlman declares.
If the first step in getting from communication to prime source of entertainment involves access to tools, then the second - and far more difficult - step is the creation of new content. One of the things about WebTV that has really stuck with me was how we didn't develop the new media that should go with it, Perlman says. It would be like inventing a movie camera without creating movies.
A word Perlman often uses to describe his aims is convergence. And he envisions Rearden Steel as the place where it will all come together. But Perlman is a practical sort of visionary. He knows that no matter how brilliant and audacious you may be, convergence will be an exploratory process.
At the big launch party for the Rearden Steel studio in January, Perlman and his team did take a few exhilarating steps along the converging roads. Perlman recalls the memorable night, which featured both a virtual and a live master of ceremonies bantering against each other in front of a virtual set. Both MC's answered questions all night long from people who were watching the event in Japan. Meanwhile, we had a party of people milling around watching this whole thing as it's happening live, eating sushi and drinking beer, Perlman exults. And it was all done on a night in January from a little loft in San Francisco. They say all the world's a stage? Well, that's the future of entertainment. It really is.