It's not that surprising that WinCustomize users have a favorable impression fo Stardock. Or is it?

WinCustomize users tend to have a higher percentage of Stardock customers. So that would imply that Stardock must have a pretty healthy customer satisfaction level.

On the other hand, there could be a back-lash against the seemingly rabid "I hate Stardock" people out there. In my view, I think that backlash is directed more to the underlying motives of the "Stardock is evil" crowd: Commercial software.

For the past 5 years, the "free intellectual property" crowd (or as I call them the "free beer" crowd, have been trying to demonize anyone who tries to make a living creating intellectual property.

You see this when skin authors are able to make a living this way. You see this when software developers ask for registration fees.

Amazingly, the "free beer" crowd usually quickly resorts to charging that OTHER people are greedy. Which I just find incredible. It's almost always the people who have contributed nothing whatsoever to a given community that are the first to cry "greed" when someone who has contributed for years tries to get some type of compensation.

We see that here all the time. After downloading 100 megabytes of stuff, users are actually asked to either register one of the programs they're using these skins and themes on or get a WinCustomize subscription or to start contributing skins and themes to the community. And what is the first thing they yell? How WE are greedy. I guess it's the ultimate "takes one to know one".

And that's where Stardock comes in. Because it makes commercial software (and asks for a whopping $10 to $20 on the various programs), it instantly creates an anti-Stardock crowd.

I suspect that some of these people recognize that their arguments are transparent so they tend to exagerate their position.

One popular argument I see is that Stardock basically swooped in like some Monty Burns vulture onto the "skinning scene" and began leeching off of it. As if there was this big skinning thing going on before Stardock.

In reality, Object Desktop went into beta on OS/2 in 1994. It SKINNED OS/2. It wasn't called skinning back then but that's what it was doing. When Object Desktop began being developed for Windows, skinning was a major development focus when development began in early 1997. The skinning component went into public beta in the summer of 1998.

Stardock also released the first (or one of them) system wide icon changing program in 1997 called PlusPak: Themes. In Windows that became IconPackager and it went 1.0 in 1999.

Here's a screenshot of Object Desktop on OS/2 from the mid 90s:
https://www.stardock.com/products/od20/megashot.jpg

Even back then you can see where WindowFX, WindowBlinds, ObjectZIP, ControlCenter, ObjectDock, ObjectBar, and DesktopX would come from. These concepts were vastly expanded on Windows since hardware and underlying Windows technologies matured. But the basics were already there.

But this also represents the strength of commercial software. There ARE advantages to commercial software. The same people working on WindowBlinds 4 are the same people who worked on WindowBlinds 1.0 back in 1998. That's going to be 5 years of development by the same team. And it's not light development, it's very intense. The teams that work on DesktopX and ObjectBar and IconPackager and WinStyles and ControlCenter are dedicated for the long haul and one reason for this is because they can justify spending time on it.

The problem with freeware and open source is if you're not getting paid, you really can only work on it during your free time and that becomes a problem as the program gets increasingly complicated.

After all, who wants to spend their Saturday night figuring out why there are pink bits showing up on a particular skin on Windows 98SE when they're using an Trident video card? That's not fun.

Of course, when that argument falls apart for the anti-Stardock people the other one comes up:

"Okay, sure they've been around since the beginning but their software is buggy and bloated and they charge for everything!"

None of which is true. One of the things that always pains me is the charge that WindowBlinds uses a lot of RAM. It's a totally bogus claim. It's so easy to disprove (just look at your total RAM commitment when WindowBlinds is loaded versus when you're using an msstyle -- WindowBlinds uses LESS RAM than Windows XP's own visual style does). If anything, WindowBlinds should get kudos from the "fast, efficient code crowd" because it uses so little RAM.

DesktopX is the same way. It actually suppports MEMORY COMPRESSION on the fly. It actually requires fewer resources to use DesktopX as a simple email checker or system resource meter than it is to use a stand alone specialized resource monitor or email checker (again, just load up task manager and view total RAM commitment).

Then there's the whole "Never do freeware" which again is bogus.

LogonStudio (www.logonstudio.com) is free.

XPBench (www.xpbench.com) is free

ObjectDock (www.objectdock.com) is free.

Stack n Sack (game) is free (Christmas game)
https://www.stardock.com/products/drengin/sns/

Elves Inc. (https://www.stardock.com/products/elves/)

Stellar Frontier is free (https://www.stardock.com/products/sf)

And DesktopX and CursorXP are practically free in the sense that you can use DesktopX forever and CursorXP has a freeware version.

That isn't to say there aren't plenty of legitimate reasons why someone wouldn't like Stardock. They may have had a bad software experience with Stardock. Or maybe they had trouble with one of its services. Or maybe they find my posts repulsive! There are lots of reasons. But the ones most commonly posted about seem to be often from people who just don't like the idea of paying for intellectual property (whether that be software or music or movies) and use various methods to justify that dislike of intellectual property.