Development traffic jam!
Development not slowing down, communication has!
Tuesday, March 14, 2006 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
If it seems like things have slown down in the past few months, it's because it has. But not in terms of development What's been slowed down is our ability to actually release/deliver things.
We've got updates to WindowBlinds, WindowFX, IconPackager, WinCustomize Browser, DesktopX, SoundPackager, LogonStudio, SkinStudio, a couple new premium suites, new fish, new gadgets, ThinkDesk components, ObjectBar, Control Center, Multiplicity, KeepSafe, and a bunch of other stuff.
So what's the deal? That stupid game, Galactic Civilizations II, has eaten up so much of Stardock's internal support/marketing/IT resources that, well you get the picture. The good news is that the game's doing very well and we're on a hiring spree so that this kind of thing won't happen in the future.
The other good news is that in the coming weeks, you're going to have a downpour of new goodies to play with! Stay tuned. In the meantime, check out the galleries, some great new stuff from Essorant, ChaNinja and others!
Our goal is to fully build up WinCustomize.com into its own independent "business unit" by the time Windows Vista ships and to have marketing/support/IT resources that are more than capable of dealing with both a popular game and all the other cool stuff. We're hiring in all areas right now. Tech support, marketing, sales, developers, artists, you name it. If you are interested in working in sunny Plymouth Michigan, drop your resume to [email protected].
So I want to issue a hearfelt apology that things have been kind of slow in delivering this stuff. We're working on it. 
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Reply #22 Wednesday, March 15, 2006 6:37 PM
I understand completely your frustration. I believe that in the end, WC will benefit from the popularity of GC2. This is a community. Shit happens. I think Stardock is dealing with it the best they can. Just like any community, you have to be a little supportive and tolerant. Give em a couple of weeks to get caught up.
Reply #23 Wednesday, March 15, 2006 6:43 PM
Reply #24 Wednesday, March 15, 2006 7:14 PM
Someone on IRC [#stardock] commented less than 24 hours ago....something along the lines of "I wonder how long it'll be before someone demands a discount/refund for the lost uptime of the site".
I said...."it's bound to happen....it's happened before".
Yes, 'paying for' something only to have it denied you is 'annoying'...may even make you 'mad as hell', but in reality the 'denial' is both intermittent and temporary.
Is it really an affront to one group in deference to another, or is it rather an issue that was unforseen in its degree of impact and thus unavoidable?
Wincustomize.com is an ongoing entity whose members can enjoy its facility in perpetuity, whereas GalCiv's intrusion/impact is time-limited because the frantic popularity of 'the new' will diminish but not before its 'customers', too assist with the financial support of Wincustomize.com. [the incoming servers are testament to this].
The economies of scale are such that Stardock pays the lion's share of Wincustomize.com's costs. As yet we, the subscribers do not. My subscription pays for approximately One Half of an hour of Wincustomize.com's Uptime, so if the site was only up for 15 minutes in a year I might feel 'diddled'. Total up all the subscribers and you'd probably make it a few weeks....
The reality is that the WC downtime is a temporary necessity that we either accept whilst twiddling thumbs or accept whilst doing those things we'd otherwise be putting off....
Reply #25 Wednesday, March 15, 2006 8:09 PM
Reply #26 Wednesday, March 15, 2006 8:12 PM
Reply #27 Wednesday, March 15, 2006 9:13 PM
| Someone on IRC [#stardock] commented less than 24 hours ago....something along the lines of "I wonder how long it'll be before someone demands a discount/refund for the lost uptime of the site". I said...."it's bound to happen....it's happened before". |
Give me a break jafo, did I ever mention a refund or anything along these lines? No absolutely not.
Reply #28 Wednesday, March 15, 2006 11:27 PM
Reply #29 Thursday, March 16, 2006 1:35 AM
... and Jafo (#3) was right, I am now really looking forward to get the new goodies.
Reply #31 Thursday, March 16, 2006 7:07 AM
I think you are looking at this the wrong way. I think OD/WC customers pay for way more than 15 min. Stardock is the one allowing 20 million visitors a month to suck the bandwidth like a drunk at a pub. Subscribers don't control that, you do. I pay a subscription to help cover the bandwidth "I" use. I don't pay so 20 million users a month can browse the site, I pay so I can. Shut out the 19.9 million users if you must, I could really care less. But give those who have supported you over the years an available site. I think we deserve it, game or no game.
Reply #32 Thursday, March 16, 2006 10:08 AM
I think the least you could've done is sent those of us who are WC subscribers an email letting us know what was going on.
I couldn't get to this site for the past 5 days/week (whatever it is), not even to the front page. The only reason I knew what was going on is because I went and looked around the Neowin forums for information.
At the very least, I feel like my subscription ought to deserve a short email giving a heads up.
Reply #33 Thursday, March 16, 2006 11:33 AM
| I'm mad as hell. For a couple of years, we've heard your constant whining about Wincustomize being an independant entity from Stardock and we need to pay for the bandwidth, servers and everything else you threw our way. We renew our ObjectDesktop subscription once a year, we renew our WC subscription every other year (remember, Stardock and Wincustomize are 2 distinct entities). |
And for just as many years they have been trying to get enough people to subscribe so the site cna be on its own. You subscribed of which is great, but ummm the other 40,000 people didn't subscrib but still se the site like its some sort of free ride.
I think you should blame those who could subscribe to the site and don't rather than Stardock.
Reply #34 Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:08 PM
This particularly won't go as smoothly when the parent company is understaffed, and the subsidiary is underfunded.
Reply #35 Friday, March 17, 2006 3:31 AM
Sure You are easy on that because You didn't pay extra for it (except for the stardock apps).
Reply #36 Friday, March 17, 2006 11:07 AM
You pay $20 for one year. I bet the downtime was maybe .1% of the year, if that. Meaning 99.9% of the time WinCustomimze was up. If you are buying server space for a website, the host will usually guarantee 99.9% uptime, never 100%. So there was no big loss, or ripoff, or blow to your lives.
This was an isolated incident, which seems to be fixed now. As I said, this whole thing is probably out of people's minds already.
And it's pretty unfair for those of you who are basically accusing non-subscribers as being 'leechers' of WC. Some of us have a good reason why we haven't subscribed, and don't need being talked down to or demonized.
Reply #37 Friday, March 17, 2006 12:06 PM
| I don't post often but when I do, I always try to be polite, supportive and helpful. This is not one of those time. I'm mad as hell. For a couple of years, we've heard your constant whining about Wincustomize being an independant entity from Stardock and we need to pay for the bandwidth, servers and everything else you threw our way. We renew our ObjectDesktop subscription once a year, we renew our WC subscription every other year (remember, Stardock and Wincustomize are 2 distinct entities). Now Stardock releases a game which is popular, whoopie, good for you. First, no updates on the OD front for 3 months, second Wincustomize (remember? that SEPARATE entity from Stardock) slows down to a crawl which you told us was because your game is a big hit (like I said earlier, good for you I'm really happy it is) and the hits on your game site and it eats up OUR bandwidth. I say OUR because we paid for it. Now today I come to the site and it's down, not slow, totally shut down, and you have the nerve to give the link to your game site which is blindingly fast!! WTF!! Don't you have no shame? Your game site is not WC, it's a Stardock product. Try to tell your game customers which just paid 40 bucks a pop for your game that they need to cough up some more dough to pay for servers and bandwidth. Go on, try it, you did the exact same thing with us with WC. Let's see how they react. In the meantime, don't shut us down at WC while your game site is running faster than Google. I don't give a crap about your game, Editor's choice or not. If there isn't enough bandwidth for WC and your game site it's not the WC community problem. Make them pay for a subscription like you did with us at WC after we paid for our OD subscription. I'm sure they'll love it. I could live with no updates and zero presence on your part in WC for 3 months, but shutting us down for the servers and bandwidth we paid for while you game site is unaffected is not only unethical but shows a total lack of respect on the customers who help your company gets to where it is now. We (meaning the paying customers at WC) don't deserve to be treated like that, geez. Like I said, I'm mad as hell. |
The GOAL of WinCustmize.com is to be an independent entity. But we don't get enough people to subscribe so Stardock ends up footing the bill.
Last October we had a subscription drive designed to pay for new servers, bring on a full time person to work on web development and help pay for bandwidth.
We needed 2,000 people MINIMUM to even get that started. We got roughly 800 or so. This on a site with over 20 million monthly visitors.
Someone has to pay the bills for the site and that entity is Stardock. It will be money from Galactic Civilizations that hires the people WinCustomize needs to go to the next level.
Reply #38 Friday, March 17, 2006 12:16 PM
| I'll add my voice to the people expressing dissatisfaction with the way it appears all resources have been put toward GalCivII. I've been an OD subscriber for five years but I've now let it lapse: I'm tired of paying and not seeing any updates or news. |
You're not a subscriber to WinCustomize and never have been. So what are you talking about? Being an OD subscriber has nothing to do with WinCustomize.
When you bought Object Desktop you purchased a software product. That software product, i.e. the one that regularly wins Editor's Choice Awards, has seen significant free updates in the past year.
Your perspective frustrating because here we provide something well beyond what we have to -a FREE skinning site- and in response we get comments such as this.
It's attitudes like yours that tempts me to shut WinCustomize.com down entirely. If you think your $50 Object Desktop purchase, which includes nearly two dozen programs, somehow should also WinCustomize and that any interuption to that service is somehow affecting the value of your Object Desktop purchase then please, don't buy our products. Go. Go NOW.
I think Stardock needs to have a new policy: Object Desktop users don't get unlimited downloads of this site and in fact get no special priviledges. How does that sound? Because we know (obviously) what % of Object Desktop users make use of WinCustomize and it's not large. I realize that sounds extreme but it's quite obvious that some Object Desktop users think that their purchase of Object Desktop includes WinCustomize.com. Her'es the feature list of Object Desktop. WinCustomize is not there.
And before someone starts, we know of people posting anedotal evidence of how they learned about Object Desktop or WindowBlinds from WinCustomize and so we need it. However, since all copies of WindowBlinds/Object Desktop are sold by Stardock and share the same accounts on WC, we KNOW, to the exact number, how many customers of Object Desktop and WindowBlinds interact with WinCustomize. So when I say that Stardock doesn't need WinCustomize I say that as a fact.
Stardock cares about WinCustomize and its community. We care about it. We care about it a lot on a personal level. But from a business point of view? Stardock doesn't need WinCustomize. Object Desktop/WindowBlinds sales actually increased while WC was down, probably because the other sites were faster. So don't kid yourself that Stardock somehow needs this site. It doesn't. It WANTS WinCustomize. We love the community, but don't treat us like we're your servants. If you're a SUBSCRIBER then absolutely, we'll bend over backwards for you. But you're not.
And where were you when the site was in need last October? This whole situation of downtime wouldn't have happened if we had met the subscription drive goal of a mere 2,000 subscribers. You should be thanking the people who subscribed to this site that we were able to keep the site up at all. If it weren't for them, it wouldn't have been 16 hours of downtime, it would have been a week.
The only reason we got the new servers is because of game sales justified adding more servers which WinCustomize benefits from.
But getting back to your main point - Object Desktop gets more free updates in a given year than any other similar product (or utility) that I know of.
Reply #39 Friday, March 17, 2006 12:22 PM
| Jafo / Brad, I think you are looking at this the wrong way. I think OD/WC customers pay for way more than 15 min. Stardock is the one allowing 20 million visitors a month to suck the bandwidth like a drunk at a pub. Subscribers don't control that, you do. I pay a subscription to help cover the bandwidth "I" use. I don't pay so 20 million users a month can browse the site, I pay so I can. Shut out the 19.9 million users if you must, I could really care less. But give those who have supported you over the years an available site. I think we deserve it, game or no game. |
This I agree with totally. And in fact this is something we've started working on. In the future, if something like this occurrs, there will be a button that lets us switch the site to subscriber only so bring down traffic.
Reply #40 Friday, March 17, 2006 12:26 PM
| We needed 2,000 people MINIMUM to even get that started. |
Would equate to roughly $40,000.00. Which is what a lot of people don't see...the larger an online community grows, the larger it's support efforts must be.
If WC's "goal" is to become an independent entity, as Frogboy states, that would mean it's time to cut the imbilical cord. Sink or swim. Paying for the use of Stardock's software is one thing, giving those that bought it a 'free' subscription to WC. However, if you truly wish to fly on your own wings, you're gonna have to make a choice. Either stay that way and live with it, or switch everyone to a temporary account like I had when I first signed up. 100mb of downloads, then that's it. (but, keep in mind the rival sites that host the same themes and they don't require, yet, a subscription to keep downloading)
You can't have it both ways. You will not be able to get that many people willing to buy the software, AND have to pay for the themes. Just not going to happen, or it would have already. 20 million people stopping in to look in the window every month is a nice way of saying the site is popular, but so are the shops on 5th Ave in New York. That's all that it is...people looking in the window. The reality stems from how many customers actually come in, and buy something. How a site's popularity is judged by how many people stop by each day, is beyond me. I think it should be judged by how many people truly support the site, and use it for every day purposes.
So, knowing that, WC is either gonna have to make the jump, or stay where it's at.
As far as the updates go from Stardock, yeah, I'd appreciate getting them. Especially for CursorXP which is notorious for crashing by just installing a new cursor. Having to use Theme Manager to compensate is truly annoying.
Edit: Admin Frogboy. With all due respect, you need to tame your temper. I am telling you this from a mutual business manager's viewpoint. How you treated that poster's comment, is the same as Ronald McDonald flippen off those who drive by and don't buy any hamburgers. Now, whether this post is edited by you or not, someone's gonna see what you posted, and to be honest it's worse than a black eye. NEVER EVER EVER yell at a potential customer, or make them feel insuperior because of a question, or how they asked it. Especially not in the eye of the public. You want support for this site, but you are screaming at those who haven't purchased a subscription, or in my view, showing them predjudice because of it. Ban me if you must, no sweat off my nose...but damn man, that is not how you treat people.
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Reply #21 Wednesday, March 15, 2006 6:22 PM
I'm mad as hell. For a couple of years, we've heard your constant whining about Wincustomize being an independant entity from Stardock and we need to pay for the bandwidth, servers and everything else you threw our way. We renew our ObjectDesktop subscription once a year, we renew our WC subscription every other year (remember, Stardock and Wincustomize are 2 distinct entities).
Now Stardock releases a game which is popular, whoopie, good for you. First, no updates on the OD front for 3 months, second Wincustomize (remember? that SEPARATE entity from Stardock) slows down to a crawl which you told us was because your game is a big hit (like I said earlier, good for you I'm really happy it is) and the hits on your game site and it eats up OUR bandwidth. I say OUR because we paid for it.
Now today I come to the site and it's down, not slow, totally shut down, and you have the nerve to give the link to your game site which is blindingly fast!! WTF!! Don't you have no shame?
Your game site is not WC, it's a Stardock product.
Try to tell your game customers which just paid 40 bucks a pop for your game that they need to cough up some more dough to pay for servers and bandwidth. Go on, try it, you did the exact same thing with us with WC. Let's see how they react.
In the meantime, don't shut us down at WC while your game site is running faster than Google. I don't give a crap about your game, Editor's choice or not. If there isn't enough bandwidth for WC and your game site it's not the WC community problem. Make them pay for a subscription like you did with us at WC after we paid for our OD subscription. I'm sure they'll love it.
I could live with no updates and zero presence on your part in WC for 3 months, but shutting us down for the servers and bandwidth we paid for while you game site is unaffected is not only unethical but shows a total lack of respect on the customers who help your company gets to where it is now. We (meaning the paying customers at WC) don't deserve to be treated like that, geez.
Like I said, I'm mad as hell.