The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Apple's transformation upstages RealNetworks

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Apple's transformation upstages RealNetworks: "RealNetworks pioneered digital media in the 1990s and doubled its music-subscription business last year, but Wall Street's playing a different tune nowadays.
When RealNetworks founder and chief executive, Rob Glaser, pitched his stock yesterday at the Goldman Sachs Technology Symposium, the room was half empty and only a handful of investors stayed around to ask questions.
Digital media is hot, but RealNetworks apparently is not, at least in comparison with Apple. Apple boss Steve Jobs didn't make it to Goldman's conference, but the company's chief financial officer came and drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 institutional investors."
...
"'"It's really a very simple story — Apple is transforming from a niche computer company into a consumer-electronics company, and the PC is also transforming into a consumer-electronics device, more like a home stereo where you know how to press a few buttons and it works," he said. "If Apple is really doing that and the products are really going that way, then it will be really successful — it will be basically Sony, that's what it will wind up looking like.'"

($.07 says: Apple and Sony will merge -- it's only a matter of time...)