Everyone’s been linking to Jogin’s spot-on rant on RealPlayer, but the follow-ups including a forwarded internal memo from Real and an email from a consultant who used to work for Real are a must read.
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.
Though I have to smugly admit that the Mac OS X version of RealPlayer has no ads and has been very stable. Still, gimmie QuickTime though.