Fashion Victim

Stardock, the latest victim of “fashionable hostility”?

A few weeks back, skinnables.org held a contest, in which contestants were to design a new skinnables.org link button. The grand prize was a skinnables.org email account. Not particularly enticing to me. But things became interesting when skinnables kahuna panda Integer promised me he'd start a positive thread about Stardock if I (crae) would win.

I won. Integer wrote his article. It was good. And so we're reprinting it here.

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Ok, some of you will know that I'm posting this as a consequence of a bet with craeonics, but I'd like to point out that I'm not saying anything I don't believe here — I mean every word of it.

Many things have been said about Stardock — it seems to be one of the most discussed subject's in this so-called “community/scene", if not the subject that brings out the extremes in people — me incuded. I have said many things that I wish I hadn't — things I still believe in, but perhaps were not appropiate at the time and only resulted in further animosities — my bad, shame on me.

First off, I'd like to clarify where I stand. I'm not anti-payware, I don't think “Stardock is evil”, nor am I on a crusade to turn everyone against payware or Stardock. I don't think anyone who charges for their software is greedy or selling out etc… I'm not jealous of people who make money by doing what they enjoy, and I haven't jumped on the “Stardock is evil” bandwagon — all my opinions are exactly that — my own opinions that haven't been swayed in any way by anyone else, and I don't expect anyone else to be swayed by mine.

Now that I've made that clear — let's get down to business. Is Stardock evil? No. It's a software company — how can they be evil? My only misgivings about Stardock are their marketing techniques, but I'm not going into that here, that horse has been flogged already.

In my view, people that actually have real, well founded opinions against Stardock are few and far between, but the ball is kept rolling by the many apparant “teens” that pop up everywhere screaming “Windowblinds is buggy”, “its a resource hog”, “it slows my computer down”. Now, some of these may be valid points in certain situations, but I'd like to bet the majority are just kids trying to be cool and rise against the big nasty corporation. This ensures that any mature opinions are lost in the mayhem, and everyone is branded as a member of the “free beer” campaign. It usually turns out that these people are running very old versions of the software, or a heavy skin.

This whole scene revolves around customisation, and that goes hand-in-hand with tweaking, and tweaking some more, its very rare to fire up your new customising app and have it run silky smooth right off the bat — they need work. It seems fashionable to jump on to a messageboard at the slightest problem and bitch to your friends about how much Windowbllinds screw up/slowed down your system instead of trying to solve the problem yourself or contacting the developers… For some reason Stardock seem to suffer more from this than any other software companies, and I'd like to bet that this is because it's deemed fashionable to bash Stardock, and we all now that kids are suckers for the latest trend.

I have very little experience with Stardock software — I have tried some of the shareware versions, but I didn't continue to use them simply because they were not what I was looking for at the time. This isn't to say it's bad software, just that it's not for me. The developers at Stardock know more about their trade than probably all skinners put together, and I'm sure as hell they know more than the kid down the road who's telling them how crap their software is. It's comparable to 90% of computer users saying how crap windows is — I'd like to bet that more than half of that 90% wouldn't be using a computer if it wasn't for windows. Again, it comes down to being fashionable to slur the big corporations…

At the end of the day, the same principles apply to all software users/developers. If you find a bug — report it so it can be resolved. If you dont like the software — dont use it, but theres no need to tell everyone else not to use it. If you love the software — tell the developers — they all need a pat on the back now and again. If you have a feature idea — tell them that too, it may be implemented in a future release.

There has been a lot of bad blood between Brad and I, perhaps with mistakes been made on both sides. I can't say that we're gonna be the best of friends, but the pistols are certainly back in their holsters. Things seems to have settled a bit now, community-wide. It seems that instead of one big happy(!) family, we have wandered off and found our own little niche's in the community, and things tick along nicely until someone steps over the borders of these little niche's, and then the feathers fly. Let's call these niche's “villages” for example.

On one hand its a shame, because back in the days of the “big city” everyone pretty much knew everyone else, and there was a sense of belonging — but on the other hand, the divisions could be beneficial — the population has exploded and divided into villages — each village has it's own loyal followers, and they provide more input than perhaps they would if they were out in the big city — thus strengthening each village, and enhancing the villages particular product.

I suppose its a natural progression, let's just hope the populations of each village can learn to accept the other villages ways — we've had enough civil wars to fill a history book already…

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This article originally appeared over at skinnables.org.

— Integer, September 18th 2002