Time for Tech--->Focus company of the month:RealNetworks

Ok I have two things to say about this company:

1)they have improved over the years since the G2 days (BUFFERING..... anyone?)

2)they have made the easiest flash video downloader ever. it is part of realplayer now

however a few points I will note:

they used to be extremely responsive on thier facebook page. I was impressed. I had an issue with something and they actually wanted to call me to help me

fix it! That was impressive!

then they got slacking with thier response time. they also got slower at rolling updates for the firefox addon. they were fast with getting Firefox 4.0 support, however they took a long time getting support out for Firefox 5.0 even though it is extremely easy to patch addons. I've done it with the addons that are featured on this blog. I almost had it working, however there were prolly some code bits I couldn't touch, due to them being locked down by realnetworks. I would have patched it within the hour Fx 5 came out!

Also the Firefox team allows anyone to test versions way way before they come out! as of 7:19 AM 9/4/2011 I am running the firefox 9.0a1 nightly while 6.0 is the current stable version. the Fx team does this so the addon developers can get ahead. same as microsoft with thier MSDN.

They got TONS fo facebook messages on thier wall and they ignored the users. it got really bad after a while. I was saddend becuase I really liked realnetworks.

Things get worse..... a LOT WORSE!

there is a group of people that made something called real alternative, an alternative to using "bloated realplayer" and it was stripped down codecs and redistrib. No longer needing realplayer.

a guy that ran a software download site simply places a LINK  to the download page on his site and realnetworks has the balls to go sue him for 200,000 euros. NOT A GOOD MOVE REALNETWORKS. IT IS JUST A LINK. and nothing more. he does not even host the download file on his server. This is the same as

google having a link to it on thier search results!

I have no clue what motivated realnetworks to do this!

yet... here's something.... they are releasing this cloud music service called UNIFI right....

and the videos where they are demonstrating it they have connectitivty issues.....

watch it here:




I think it's a neat idea, but I though of something like that when I first heard about cloud computing.

How could you do stuff that is so cool, yet go after people like that for the real alternative stuff? as well as ignore people on your facebook page? this has me almost in tears because I was really starting to like them!!!! Not cool realnetworks. not cool. I don't know if I should still like them or not... you help me on this on readers....