Oops. Guess I must have gone a bit overboard if what I wrote dragged you in here, Brad. Sorry, I was in a lousy mood at the time.
Lets get one thing out of the way, first and foremost: I have all the respect in the world for you. In my opinion you are one of the best businessmen and marketing guys I have ever met. Without you Stardock would definitely not be where it is at this point.
Anyway, WindowBlinds never had any *real* competition until MS stuck its nose into skinning, as it always does when any non-MS business reaches critical mass (hope Bill doesn't come in here because I said this, btw.
).
Stardock as a software company started with a suite of popular Object Desktop utilities for IBM's late OS2, which IBM actually ended up shipping with the system. When IBM finally admited defeat and dropped support for OS2, Stardock found itself in a real bad financial situation. The only alternative to keep Stardock afloat was to migrate OD to Windows (and I know how much flack you got from OS2 users for this, who even called you a traitor). Unfortunately OD's impact in the Windows world was minimal, to say the least - until Neil and WindowBlinds came along. You had the foresight to see WB's importance and hired Neil on the spot. If anything saved Stardock at this point, it was WindowBlinds.
eFx development had stopped by the time WindowBlinds started getting popular - I remember because that's about when I showed up at the scene (end of 1998). eFx still had lots of problems when development stopped, so the only real alternative was WB.
Chroma showed up much later, in mid-1999, when WB was already very popular. It never catched up mainly because it only had a handfull of available skins, while WB already had hundreds. I think their skin engine was also really hard to make skins for, if I remember correctly.
The only real competition to WindowBlinds came with XP and their built-in skinning engine. Had MicroSoft
at that point opened up XP's skinning format then Stardock would probably have been in real trouble, since WB was still Stardock's main cash cow - in this respect Stardock was very lucky. For the record, the main reason MS refrained from opening the skin format to third party skinners was because a bad skin could easilly crash the OS or render it innoperable - and then who do you think the users would blame? The skin or the OS?
StyleXP (and their hacking of the XP skinning engine) came later, but at this point Stardock was already big enough (and diversified) to handle that kind of competition.
Another 'lucky' milestone (and when I say lucky I don't mean that luck was the only factor involved, btw, since not everybody would recognize these lucky breaks and take advantage of them) was the dismissal of Skinz.org (which was the major skin repository at the time) and the creation of Wincustomize, which soon took it's place. Including non-Stardock applications areas in Wincustomize was very clever and instrumental in getting Wincustomize (and Stardock) where it is now. It was also a gamble, IMO, since sites like Wincustomize are real money pits in terms of bandwidth.
Anyway, WindowBlinds allowed Stardock to grow enough (i.e. have enough money) to be able to hire other developers and significantly expand the measly - in the begining - portfolio of OD applications. OD thus became a much more attractive proposition over buying the applications individually. By giving every single Stardock application 'away' with OD, you also achieved what Microsoft achieves when they ship extra software with the OS itself: even if there is something better out there, most customers will not bother looking for it (much less paying for it) since they feel that what they already have is 'good enough'.
Another stroke of genius was the 'subscription' method used in OD, of which you were indeed a pioneer. While other shareware companies offered free upgrades for life (Winstep never did, btw) and thus closed the door to repeated revenue, you ensured that money kept comming in from the existing customer base.
So, businesswise it's easy to see why I look up to you, even if I don't agree with some of the things you do.
As for Winstep, I agree with most of what you said. In part because of the amount of competition Winstep had, it was never able to reach critical mass and therefore be able to hire external developers to heavilly expand it's portfollio of applications... and NextSTART was never a 'killer' application like WindowBlinds, since it is not for everyone and appeals mostly to power users. You yourself admited that when you concluded that Stardock's ObjectBar wasn't selling nearly as much as you thought it would.
The bottom line is that Winstep is basically me... and I'm buried here in Portugal (a small country in Europe with less than 10 million inhabitants) without any real access to the stuff that could make Winstep become better well known: the US media (and we all know how it works: the more people hear about you, the more downloads you get and, the more downloads you get, the more registrations you get). I'm also basically a programmer and I know next to nothing of marketing - so I'm happy that Winstep got as far as it did, and I can only conclude that it was on the meriths of the applications themselves and not on any marketing hype.
Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2004 10:30 pm 
