I've given Real Networks' various promotional offers a spin as well over the years, and detest the service thoroughly, with its intrusive advertising, its cockeyed user design, its spotty performance, its tendency to tie up 99 percent of my CPU for minutes on end for no apparent reason, not to mention the intangibles — it has no ethos at all save the plastic fantastic corporate infotainment mojo that so disgusts me. The junior Ralph Naders at E-Pinions tend to agree with me over the years. I believe the phrase "vicious, buggy spyware" gets used in there by someone. I might subtract a star or a star and half from their aggregate rating, but then I'm particular.

So will this acquisition offer the Christians another chance to civilize the Romans? I doubt it, since the conqueror this time is the Golden Horde of Ghengis Khan, whose attention is focused, not on making its customers happy, but jockeying for world supremacy with its other nominal "partners" in the died-and-supposedly-to-be-resurrected MusicNet subscription service — the Huns at Vivendi, the Vlad the Impaler crowd at Bertlesmann, the unlimited supply of Venetian pillagers of Constantinople at EMI, and so on.

I could not have been more wrong when I wrote about Real Networks and its role in MusicNet a couple of years ago,

RealSystems is undoubtedly the class of the field, and may be able, through its partnerships, to provide pieces of solutions to the other technical issues facing MusicNet. ... AOL's endorsement of the technology ought to count for something, in the wake of its attempt to draft the inventors of Gnutella to home brew its own peer-to-peer distribution model.

As far as I can see, Real and its partners have learned nothing about what their users want and demand in the intervening months and years. Or maybe the Rhapsody buy is a sign that Real, at least, is beginning to get that way. Keep your ears peeled.