Real and Rob were expecting to make a strategic investment in a startup, only to lose out to Microsoft at the last minute. [That sent Glaser] screaming, throwing things, and ultimately slamming the door on the way out of the CEO's office knocking and breaking a picture on the wall.

Next: Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff: Flowers ... and handcuffs

(Photo by AP/Lennihan)

The irony here: Before partnering with RealNetworks, MTV ran a music service, Urge, in partnership with Microsoft — which is now trying to buy Yahoo. Timing is everything. We look forward to the introduction of purple Zunes.

This news only dwindles even further the value of Yahoo's subscription music service, which its reportedly been trying to offload for around $90 million. Why won't that happen? The most likely buyer, Napster, doesn't have even that much cash lying around. RealNetworks could buy it, but they're more focused on their booming mobile business right now. Or at least they should be.

The only serious potential buyers are RealNetworks, though they may have fallen out of buyout talks already, and Napster, which continues to perform poorly and just recently began to shift its strategy away from subscriptions, too. Getting out of the subscription business is probably a necessary move for Yahoo, but the company may just have to settle for mothballing the operation. Good riddance.

• November 1996 Yahoo and MTV announce the creation of UnfURLed, "the ultimate guide to music on the Web." The site is promised to launch in January 1997.
• January 1997 UnfURLed does not launch.
• July 1997 UnfURLed launches, six months late. The site later disappears, forgotten.
• February 1999 Viacom acquires Imagine Radio, a service which lets users listen to preprogrammed music channels, or create their own. (If that sounds a lot like Last.fm or Pandora, that's because it was a lot like those sites.)
• May 1999 Viacom acquires SonicNet, an online music-news and information site.
• August 1999 Amid Internet fervor, Viacom creates the MTVi Group as a rollup of its Internet websites, hoping to take it public to cash in on the market for Internet stocks.
• August 2000With an IPO off the boards, Viacom reorganizes MTVi, giving control over websites like MTV.com and VH1.com back to their respective cable channels.
• 2001-2004 MTV does nothing interesting with Internet music for five years or so, as best we can tell.
• April 2005 MTV launches Overdrive, a broadband "channel." MTV later brags about how many "video streams" Overdrive serves, not noticing the complete apathy with which music fans greet it.
• July 2005 News Corp. swoops in and inks a deal to buy the parent company of MySpace. Viacom is widely reported to have been interested in buying MySpace, which gained popularity by embracing music on user profiles and getting bands to use the site to communicate with fans.
• January 2006 Microsoft and MTV launch Urge, an online music store.
• August 2006 Google and MTV announce an experimental deal to distribute videos over Google's AdSense network. The experiment, apparently a failure, dissolves quietly.
• September 2006 Viacom CEO Tom Freston, a longtime MTV exec, is fired, reportedly for missing the chance to buy MySpace. Later that month, Microsoft knifes MTV in the back by announcing its Zune player and companion store, rendering Urge pointless.
• August 2007 MTV merges Urge into RealNetworks' also-struggling Rhapsody music service.

Did I miss anything? Leave a comment below.

We're told that Accel is looking at investing in Facebook app developers. Naturally. Breyer's $13 million investment in Facebook two years ago was seen by some as a sign of a building bubble. Now with estimates of Facebook's value ranging in the billions of dollars, of course, rival VCs like Bay Partners are jealous.

But Breyer can't possibly be content with just one home-run investment. It stands to reason that he wants to build a keiretsu — a network of startups which partner with each other to build their businesses and boost their common investor's returns. John Doerr and his colleagues at Kleiner Perkins did this in the 1990s, with AOL, Netscape, Amazon.com, Intuit, Excite; Michael Moritz, at Sequoia, likewise, parlayed his firm's investments in Cisco, Yahoo, and Google into other moneymakers. Breyer's only real '90s hit, meanwhile, was RealNetworks — a thin reed on which to lay a keiretsu.

You have to admire the evil genius of the plan, if true: Breyer, a Facebook board member, can cherry-pick only the most successful app developers before rival venture capitalists have even heard of them. And Breyer, too, can guarantee favored startups something no one else can — protection from an abrupt decision by Facebook to block or cripple their apps. That power — implied, never spoken — also would bear a concomitant threat: Startups who don't play along with Accel, and accept the valuation they're given, may suddenly find Facebook an unfriendly place to write software.

So, Facebook developers, report in — is the rumor true? Has anyone gotten an offer they can't refuse? A hard sell from Accel? Drop us a word.

Spin rule #1: Take what you can get.

Our business last year was $325 million, which was up from $266 million the year before and our most recent quarter was $87 million in revenue.

Rob, that includes $39 million Microsoft paid you from your $761 million anti-trust lawsuit. What's your business plan, sue a new monopolist every five years?

Spin rule #2: If you don't have anything nice to say...

RG: In Europe we now download over 100,000 free players a day.

KB: And how many paying subscribers do you have in Europe for your players?

RG: We have not broken out the number of subscribers.

Just like I "have not broken out" the number of supermodels I've slept with.

Kate Bulkley interviews Rob Glaser of Real Networks: the unabridged version [Guardian Unlimited]