One of the trends I've noticed in "Generation Y" that's different from Generation X and especially the baby boomers is that members of Generation Y seem to automatically want to side with the overdog.

Nothing exemplifies this attitude more than the stark attitude differences about Microsoft. If you polled the typical 18 year old techie about Microsoft, you would find that they overwhelming believe Microsoft's technologies are great, innovative, and solid. Ask Generation X and a lot of skepticism shows up. And by the time you get to the baby boomers you have to weed out the profanity used to describe it.

For us at Stardock, this really bites hard because we make software that extends the OS. As a result, any time Microsoft adds something that works similarly to what we make, the overdog worshippers begin dissing our software. Often times the similarities are almost identical. Yet, if you add the Microsoft logo to our stuff, it magically becomes better, faster, smaller, etc.

It's a rather surreal experience seeing young techies equating software written by Microsoft as small, fast, efficient, and relatively bug free. I actually don't have a negative view of Microsoft's coding abilities. I think they write software a bit better than average when compared to other mega corporations. I do believe that their internal developer culture is inadvertently harmful to third party innovation. That's because developers at Microsoft are allowed to work on, in their free time, additional software projects and from what I've seen, these often end up being "inspired" by third party software rather than original creations. But there's a big difference between Freeware written by Joe freeware author and someone at Microsoft. Anything released by Microsoft gains the air of legitimacy that no third party can get.

And that brings us back to the overdog worshipping. In Windows XP, the OS supports being "skinned". The OS comes with Windows XP style blue, silver, and green. But if you're willing to hack out the digital signing protection, you can download and copy into your system directory additional themes. The msstyles format is pretty decent overall. But it's not very powerful. It was made to make the Windows XP style and as long as you're willing to basically stick with themes that are pretty basic, you can have some variety.

Our company, by contrast, makes WindowBlinds. A program that extends Windows XP to natively support skinning too. We use pretty much the same APIs so we're just as "native". The difference is that our skin format is much more advanced since our program only exists to skin and wasn't designed around a particular design.

Yet on some of the techie sites that are so frequented by Generation Ys, you would think our software was buggy crap. Often times the alleged faults with it are exactly the same faults that exist with the included msstyles (because we use the same APIs). And none of these faults are what a normal person would consider significant.

But that's where the underdog worship really takes off. All manner of faults are imagined to exist for our software and the only thing these faults have in common is that we're not from Microsoft.

Let me give you some examples to show you just how far some of the overdog worshippers will go:

Claim: There are no good skins for WindowBlinds, they're all fat and useless.

Msstyles supports only very basic skins. WindowBlinds is a superset format, it can do that plus pretty much anything else you can imagine.

Let me show you some screenshots to show you what we've been doing for years:

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-nov99.jpg (November 1999)

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-apr00.jpg (April 2000)

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-july01.jpg (July 2001)

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-july00.jpg (July 2000)

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-aug00.jpg (Aug 2000)

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-nov02.jpg (Nov 2002)

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-jan03.jpg (Jan 2003)

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-mar03.jpg (Mar 2003)

WindowBlinds can do any visual style that msstyles can since it's a superset. And in fact, with going on 3000 skins for it, there are many many minimalistic skins available.

In short, this is a baseless claim. But you see, because msstyles is so limited in what it can do and because it's Microsoft, then these limitations are "good". You can bet that if the tables were reversed these same people would be claiming that our software was too limited.

Claim: WindowBlinds uses too much memory!

WindowBlinds uses around 2 megabytes less ram when a skin is applied than msstyles does. In short, this claim is simply made up. But we hear it all the time. It's so easy to tell that it's not true, XP has a task manager that shows how much memory is allocated.

Claim: WindowBlinds skins crash my apps!

WindowBlinds uses the same APIs as XP. It's no more likely to crash an app than msstyles is.

Msstyles, as a format, are like .BMP. They get the job done. WindowBlinds is a lot like .PNG files. PNG has advantages over .BMP such as alpha channel support, compression, etc. But if these two formats were remaed .MSIMG and .IMG or something, I bet you would have a lot of people claiming that .BMP is "Better".

The really sad thing is that these overdog worshippers don't realize that if they had their way, they'd likely be worse off. Needless to say, Microsoft doesn't support people hacking their system DLL so that they can patch in additional unsigned msstyle files. The next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn is already available via various "channels" in early beta. Guess what? .msstyles is no longer supported. Microsoft isn't in the skinning business. They make OSes and their top priority is producing a great OS. They have their hands full with compatibility on things that actually matter let alone worrying whether skins made by people who are hacking out their security features to work are going to be taken care of or not.

But imaging if the overdog worshippers got their way and we disappeared. We're the only realistic alternative. Do they really want to be at the mercy of Microsoft? What most people don't realize is that Microsoft's internal culture makes individual developers there very important. The only reason why Windows XP even has an msstyles "format" is because a couple of developers there decided to create a format rather than hard code it. Imagine if they leave? There's no business justification to continue supporting skinning. So if not in Longhorn, at some point, odds are they'd be out of luck. And bear in mind, it took years for WindowBlinds to get to where it is today.

This is just one story in a cosmic book of stories on how there's an increasing tendency for young techies to blindly worship whoever is dominant. An almost innate desire to be on the winning team seems to have gripped the young techie culture. I wonder how many of them have considered the long term implications of such over dog worship.