Yes, Virginia, as hard as it may be to believe today, once upon a time RealNetworks was a very big deal.

For a real spit-take, though, put one of the companies that we think of today as Very Big Deals next to it for comparison. Like, say, comparing Apple's performance to RealNetworks' over the decade from 1997 to 2007:

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...

(I omit the last few years because AAPL has gone up so much over that period that if you include it you can't see the line for RealNetworks anymore. But check out how long it took Apple just to reach the heights Real was at in the late '90s.)

Or Adobe, all the way up to now:

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...

That Google finance page, ironically, uses Flash.

I thought you had posted broken links because it was just showing a little chart for RNWK. Then I noticed:

"For the ubercool interactive charts, you need to install the Adobe Flash Player"

Just seemed a bit ironic, given the topic.

Comparing two companies over a period of time without taking into account splits, reverse splits, dividends, etc. isn't very meaningful.

Both Google and Yahoo Finance already adjust for splits. Yahoo has an 'adjusted close' value that reports the price adjusted for dividends, but these adjustments don't change the stock price so much that it would make comparing unadjusted values 'not meaningful'.

It's not meaningful to compare because they are different companies with different market caps. I actually hear people talk about stock prices as normalized values in every day conversation, but don't know any way polite enough or fast enough to correct them.

This kind of thing happens way too much. For example, I've seen it with currencies as well. It's amazing how many people appear to implicitly assume that when you can buy, say, X >> 1 yen for one USD, that somehow means that the yen is an inferior currency. Unless you put things into historical context, those ratios are meaningless.

People understand this at a rational level when you point it out to them, but I do wonder about the extent of the economic effect of their flawed gut-level intuitions.

Although true, that's not relevant in this situation: both links posted by @smacktoward deal with percentage change in stock price, not actual stock price. Double-check the y-axis values.

Are there any good charting sites which graph market cap and float instead of price and volume?