Real Proof
Mar 07, 2004
Following my previous two posts about Real Networks and about Real Player, I've received another e-mail, this time from an anonymous individual who used to work as a consultant for Real Networks. Read for yourselves, the following text is the mail in its entirety:
Hi there,
In 2000, I was a consultant involved in a major re-design effort at Real Networks, which in a roundabout way led to the RealOne player and changes on Real.com.
All of the issues you mention with regard to ease-of-use (or the lack thereof), super commercialism, and downright misleading customers were things that we addressed during this design program.
Real spent $2.5M in design fees and over a year and a half with my company. When the relationship ended we had produced detailed design documents that were about a foot high when stacked on top of one another. While we had designed solutions to all of these problems, Real ultimately chose to ignore them. Only some of the graphic design changes we recommended ever saw the light of day.
In my experience with Real, I found a company that had absolutely no respect for the user, that was supremely arrogant, and completely mismanaged by Rob Glazer and his team.
The internal memo from Real I posted last time mentions a decision maker called Rob. I assume this is the same guy.
There were many examples that showed this.
Real's advertising company at the time was working in parallel to us to conduct consumer research on the Real brand. What they found was shocking. Real, at that time, had almost complete brand awareness among people online. Their brand was the only brand other than Microsoft, Netscape, and Yahoo! to attain this level of recognition. But unlike these other companies, Real was universally disdained by customers. Almost ever customer mentioned the deceptive download process and the way in which RealPlayer took over their system, installing software they didn't want and didn't need.
This shouldn't come as a shock to any of us. It is interesting to note, however, that Real was and is aware of the fact that their product is and has always been utter garbage. I can't quite decide if I believe it's due to ignorance or to malice though (as hinted at in the last paragraph (prior to updates) of the first post about Real Player).
My company was asked to recommend changes to the download process. We created a new process that allowed users to download the player in 3 steps, a reduction of 10 steps from the previous process.
That's what I'm talking about. Nobody could create a download process in excess of 10 steps by mistake, or due to ignorance. It must have been deliberate, or the management at Real must be the most incompetent group of people who ever met.
What we found in the process of this project was very concerning. Real as a strategy had for years intentionally obscured the free download link. Even when users found the link, the download process would try and trick (there is no other word for it) the user into downloading the pay version of the software. Real would even test multiple versions of their design to see which ones were more effective at this.
Real would resort to even more disgusting (and probably illegal) tricks. One page in the process would show the user some very legitimate choices above the "fold" (the bottom of the area of a web page that can be shown in a window without forcing the user to scroll). However, beneath the fold, Real had options for additional plug-ins with dubious value such as sound enhancers and web accelerators, that were selected BY DEFAULT. If a user did not scroll down (and the design cleverly did not signal to the user that they had any reason to do so) they would not see that there were choosing to purchase around $50 in additional software. Real told us that this page alone was responsible for driving their average order up by $25. They even told us that most people didn't even know they were buying the additional software. When we told them that we found these tactics user un-friendly, unsustainable, and bad for the brand, they agreed. But they also told us that they were "hooked on! it like heroin" and didn't want to change anything for fear of loosing revenue. Despite the fact that Real was knowingly misleading customers, and that it was driving down the value of the company and the brand, and we had designed a solution to the problem, Real refused to implement it.
Although this is the only explanation for Real's behaviour that makes sense, I find it difficult to understand how these people can be so extremely and disgustingly malicious and hostile towards their very own users.
Similar things happened with the design of the player itself. If the web team was bad, the player team was from hell. The player team was completely dominated by engineers with a total gearhead hacker mentality. They had zero respect for users and viewed the player as "their" product. Our design brief was to integrate Real's four or so consumer applications into a single product. We spent over 8 months and $1.5M designing this. However, Real's engineers had such deep "not invented here" syndrome that there refused to implement a single element of our design. They made clear to us that they saw it as their job to determine how the application functioned and that "no designer can tell me about users".
One of things we tried to correct in the design was the over commercialization of the player. Our contention was that while advertising is perfectly acceptable to users, and that they understand that advertising is the "price" you pay for a "free" product, that advertising should be clearly displayed as such and that too much advertising would undermine the player's function as a utility and drive away users. Real, on the other hand, could not help itself. They wanted banner ads, the infamous message center, interstitial ads, ads posing as a web directory of media, and on, and on.
After over a year and a half of suggesting user-centric solutions to make Real a "real" solution for consumers, Real was fed up. Our healthy push back had turned into all out war with the engineers. Our company was fired from the account, as was the advertising agency which had all along been pushing for similar change.
The people at Real must have been smoking their success in the early years, because you've gotta be stoned like a crack-whore to not understand that pretty much each and every one of Real's users will abandon their bad-getting-worse product for any alternative.
This mail would not be complete without a note on Rob Glazer. While I never met the man, I did work with many of his direct reports. What I saw over a long period was a company that was totally de-focused starting with Rob. The entire focus of the organization would change on a daily basis depending on the latest fad expressed by the company's founder in the weekly "Rob Reviews". Rob cared very little for the customer and much more for the stock. As the company searched for a purpose, it increasingly became more and more irrelevant.
All this is to say that I think your comments about Real are totally dead-on and that the company, its people, and its product are terrible.
The saddest part about the story of Real Networks isn't the malicious, downright evil people in charge of it. It isn't the fact that Real Networks intentionally spit in each and every one of their users' faces. No, the saddest part of the story, the part which really tears you up, is the fact that Real Networks didn't die an agonizing death when the industry bubble burst.
If you found this interesting, you might like to read the posts that came before it:
- Real Obnoxious This is the rant about Real's fantastically crappy product that caused the reactions from former Real Networks employees.
- Real Reply I got several e-mail from people who used to work for Real Networks, they offer some reasons for Real Player's invasiveness and hostility, and their own perspectives.
Comments
Well said... fascinating stuff.
I am sworn to never ever ever use any Real products ever again, and to encourage others not to either. Is there an alternative player we can use to view real media files?
Comment by Bruce at 16:19, 07 Mar, 2004 #
Bruce: Yes, there is, see the end of this post.
Comment by Tomas at 17:27, 07 Mar, 2004 #
Brilliant, Real pays $2.5 mil to try to improve their software in an attempt to boost their stock price, and then rejects all recommendations. So much for competant upper management.
Comment by Dan at 04:44, 08 Mar, 2004 #
Does anyone have experience with the enterprise edition cited? Seeing how the BBC version was debunked and all...
I've been using Real Alternative for a couple months now, but to mixed results. It works decently for direct links, but no go on embedded streams (as if Real's own bloat wasn't enough, what's with news sites programming a terrible, terrible frame-filled pop-up that surrounds and obscures every news clip?)
Comment by donald tetto at 05:48, 08 Mar, 2004 #
As someone who useto answer phones for Real, this is totally true... and the opt out sales still go on amazingly...try taking the first steps to get the player plus, step 2 is still opt-out sales, but now it's in your face opt-out recommended addon sales for an extra $70, bringing your one time $19.95 player plus, to an amazing $90!!!
Over 3/4th of the calls I took on a daily basis were from people who looked at their bill, and then realized they have been paying $10-20 a month for a year or sometimes more without knowing, or somehow got signed up for the dreaded Real Power Pack, full of stuff that noone needs... Personally I can't totally blame Real for all of it, only one maybe two months is all you can really attach to them, the rest is people not watching their bank accounts (which is something that i learned to do 3-4 times a week after dealing with Real)
But on Real's behalf, everyone complaining about the buffering, there is a REALLY REALLY simple fix... lower the bandwidth settings to what you really have... USE THE TEST CONNECTION BUTTON!!! if your on a DSL line, don't say you have a office LAN connection... if you lower that setting, or set it realistically in the first place, the problem mysteriously vanishes...
Comment by exReal at 06:07, 08 Mar, 2004 #
Hate is a word that's too mild to describe my feelings towards the people and products at Real.
Few companies (namely MS when they were changing the EULA per security updates) demonstrate their disdain for their customers on such a consistent basis.
I dealt with one of their Customer Service people once - about the funny "supercharge" that occurred on my Mom's credit card after she installed the RealOne player.
I got her on her last day. She was leaving, she said - because of the stress of the calls and the vitriol towards the company.
Where did she go, I asked - in order to get the respite she needed?
To a health insurance firm - validating treatment and coverage.
Says a lot.
Last thought.... if karma works, why the heck is Real still around?
Comment by Rickster at 07:49, 08 Mar, 2004 #
*sigh*
No surprise that Microsoft is in such a dominant position with so many companies like Real around.
Thanks for the insights.
cheers orangeguru
Comment by orangeguru at 13:37, 08 Mar, 2004 #
Real and its products
are terrible.
Sadly, many useful audio
products are distributed
in Real formats (Prairie
Home Companion archives,
Major League baseball
broadcasts).
Companies
take on their founders
characteristics. I know Rob Glazer way back
in 1987 when he headed up
the LanMan team at Microsoft and I was
writing OS/2 Prog. docs. Sorry to have
to say it, but his jerkdom
hasn't changed, it's just
been extended and amplified
by having a company at
his disposal.
Stan
Comment by Stan Krute at 18:24, 08 Mar, 2004 #
A good article, well put.
I personally have boycotted Real products ever a since i found it installing software onto my machine, the main one i noticed being Comet Cursor.
I searched the web to find out about this piece of software, and found this article:
http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/4520-6033_16-4205493.html
which almost identically mirrors my own situation of finding Real installing crap i didnt want.
Many times have i wanted to watch a video clip or news broadcast on the BBC or similar, but simply refuse to install anything from Real to do so. For the odd site, then Real Aternative: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=1054136293
does the job for some streams, but otherwise, i simply look up the news item on another site that doesnt use this inferior media player.
Being heavily into computers and IT in general, a lot of my friends are somewhat 'geeky', and most of the people i know refuse to install any software from Real also.
Lets hope your article and comments from your readers help other people to see the tactics and malice from this company, and hopefully more people will see sense and boycott their products.
I realise that someone is probably going to reply to this saying that they are working on it now and should not be condemned so easily as they are now taking steps to redeem themselves, but in my opinion, its too little, too late.
Comment by Zaphod at 18:48, 08 Mar, 2004 #
Whilst I would never in a million years install a Real product on Windows (the install last time left me with a kind of default recoil-reflex), the Linux version of the player (version 8) isn't too bad in the 'installing crap' stakes. Perhaps this is because I installed it via my distro who removed the badness in it and just left the player bit.
From reading the previous posts here about Real, I can see why the install process was so horiffic. I thought perhaps they were incompetent; it turns out they were both incompetent and evil.
Maybe the memo quoted from the Dan guy means that Real Player 10 will not be so bad; somehow I doubt it. Even if they are intent on fixing the problem, the product is so broken that I'd say it needs quite a few revisions in addition to an entire upper-level management change.
Dilbert comes to mind here...
Comment by Mike at 00:33, 09 Mar, 2004 #
You know, who needs to stop supporting Real are all the content providers out there. Does Real sweeten the deal for folks who choose their streaming products by giving them a cut of the ad revenue? Shouldn't there be some sort of backlash against content providers providing only Real streams?
(I will sheepishly admit that, though I can't stand Real, I'll choose its streams over Windows Media ones. As a Mac user, the experience is actually better.)
Comment by Nate at 22:35, 09 Mar, 2004 #
Actually in answer to Nate, no, Real doesn't sweeten the deal for content providers, in fact it's the exact opposite. I work with a guy who used to work for a large tech company that will remain nameless. This certain tech company was developing media player firmware that needed a codec to compress audio. They went into talks with Real.
My co-worker told me that Real's enterprise licensing is so draconian and so restrictive that it's amazing anyone chooses them. I seem to recall him mentioning "ultimate evil" when talking about Real.
They ended up going with Microsoft's much more forgiving WMA technology simply because it was much cheaper and less restrictive.
Comment by Ron at 02:18, 10 Mar, 2004 #
Could everyone who wants BBC streams in Ogg or MPEG go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/feedback/index.shtml and tell the BBC. We need some momentum behind this.
Comment by john at 11:24, 10 Mar, 2004 #
ref: John
Good idea, have passed my comments to BBC
ps: how long is this site going to stay up ;-)
Comment by fred at 12:50, 10 Mar, 2004 #
fred: The site has been here for a couple of years, and I'm not planning on taking it down.
Comment by Tomas at 12:53, 10 Mar, 2004 #
i might be the only freak on the planet who actually LIKES real player. i feel like in it's recent incarnations real ONE and real 10, they glaring extra downloads and can we place this on your desktop have gotten more obvious and easier to avoid and save for an ad every once in a hundred years, i'm willing to let it stick around on my system. but this was a really interesting topic you've brought up.
Comment by girlwonder at 15:10, 10 Mar, 2004 #
Just read your interesting articles
Looking into the Order process i found out that the Real US-Order-Version is pretty userfriendly: just 19,90 USD for the player and all additional stuff as opt-in.
When ordering the german version - when not UNCHECKING all useless stuff - you order the following:
- 49,99 Euros - RealOne Player Plus
- 24,99 Euros - RealOne Player Plus Visualizations Pack
- 22,99 Euros Yearly - auto updates
- 24,99 Euros - RealOne Power Pack
that makes 99,97 Euros ( = 121 USD!)plus 22,99 for the the yearly subscribtion
unbelievable....
Comment by Mickey at 20:22, 24 Mar, 2004 #
So one question....when is Lavasoft's Ad-Aware going to add Real to its signature files for detection and removal?
I treat Real products like I used to treat Microsoft Office's findfast: remove on sight.
MJ
Comment by Maxj at 23:20, 24 Mar, 2004 #
Google recommends that web applications keep good company by avoiding being bundled with Evil software. Google's definition of "good company" seems to differ quite substantially from mine.
Trackback from the Limey Brit at 21:30, 20 May, 2004 #
The discussion has been closed on this entry. Thanks to everybody who participated.