Their first version kicked ass, for that time. I wrote some stuff using RealPlayer around 1996 and it was truly amazing to have audio content compressed into file sizes that were actually acceptable for the early dial-up modems.

Remember that this was back in the time hand-optimizing GIF's was still an appropriate thing to do.

I guess that after their first version some business guys took over and ran the company into the ground, which is a shame ...