Check out this quickie video for WindowFX 5 coolness
http://screencast.com/t/ZipMGksIV
Beta shows up for Object Desktop users early next year.
I’m getting so smoked on BF3 it’s sad. I used to be good at this. I used to be a player, man! What the hell happened? 
People have been ragging on the Chevy Volt over some extremely unlikely issues that one could theoretically have with one. Of course, none of the people complaining actually have one.
I do. I love it. It’s the best car I’ve ever owned.
Over the last decade we’ve presented a bit of a mixed message regarding customer care.
On the one hand, we have broad customer-friendly policies such as very liberal refunds, long-term software support and post-purchase support.
We learned the above lesson from OS/2: Treat your customers as gods because customer loyalty really matters. I’ve written the details of why we do this here. But the short version is that customer loyalty can make the difference between business survival and death.
…But on the other hand…
I am often very vocal about telling individual customers to go away. And this lesson was learned from OS/2 as well.
You can never appease a zealot. Do not try. Once you discover someone is a zealot, there is no way to win them over and the energy and time you spend trying to win them over is time you could be spending helping more reasonable people. Our policy since we left the OS/2 market is to identify zealots and try to gently (or not so gently) guide them out the door once they have decided that we haven’t lived up to some impossible bar of integrity they have imagined for us.
The OS/2 market had a lot of zealots and when the market started to disintegrate in the late nineties, it became pretty clear that a lot of those zealots expected us to go down with the ship. Because Stardock’s culture formed around the concept of treating people better (i.e. we’ll treat people “right”) , we continued to invest scarce resources in OS/2 software all the way into 1999 largely just to appease these people. We never did. We were “traitors” for making Windows software too.
It took us a long time to understand that these people weren’t buying our products or services because they thought we made good stuff but because we were part of their own “cause” they were fighting in their head and once we had failed in their mind, only a damaging, but purely symbolic, sacrifice on our part would appease them.
And so we try to do right by doing good. That is, make good stuff, price it reasonably and keep our customers happy. And we’ve done pretty well at that over the years. At the same time, there will always be individuals who will never be appeased and the best path is to cut to the chase and give them their options: Accept things as they are or vote with your wallet and go elsewhere. It’s a delicate balance but one that I think has, in the bigger scheme of things, has served us well.
After 4 years, Canon has finally released drivers for their $40k Canon Image Press C1 printer line that will allow you to print a document from a program using the standard Windows settings rather than have to monkey with their cryptic driver utilities if you want to do something crazy (like print to the 11x17 paper in landscape). Hooray
I must confess, there is something…gratifying about debating with a global warming alarmist (specifically people who are certain mankind is causing global warming and specifically it’s caused by CO2) who gets in my face about their superior belief system and being able to pull out the fact that I drive an electric car that is powered by my 20KW solar array that also powers my house which is also heated via geo thermal. Match that buddy. 
I started my company when I was still a teenager. And I can tell you, looking back, I wish I knew now what I knew then. Starting a company with no capital and no partners is most definitely the hard way to do things. But I had no money and none of my friends were comfortable taking the necessary risks. The result was many years of long hard slogging. Sheer brute force in terms of hours being put in.
Capital trumps time. Anyone who says time is money really has no idea what they’re talking about. Time is pulling the plow by yourself. Money is a tractor.
But I didn’t know any of that back when I started. And even if I did, it wouldn’t have made much difference because I didn’t have any money. What I did have, was time and I used it. All of it. To build my company up.
Time, not being an infinite resource, means that choices were made. And if I was putting all my time into the company, I wasn’t putting it in at home. During this time, I got married had a kid, another kid and then another. I didn’t spend the kind of time at home that I knew, deep down, I should be.
As I began to learn that capital trumps time I concluded that once I had capital, I could really start to do amazing things. Because then I could afford to bring in people who were more talented than myself in a given area but were less fond of the crazy level of risks a start-up involves. Together, we’d do some amazing things.
In the last several years, the company has been successful enough to generate a substantial amount of capital. And with it, I have been fortunate to bring in people with great talent. And so I started thinking of all the amazing things we would do. I would put in crazy hours to do it, of course, but we would go and do amazing things.
Then Steve Jobs died.
And suddenly I realized something. What is the objective here? My oldest child just turned 15. My other two are no longer little either. And I have been missing out on them. And my wife.
For all the success and amazing accomplishments of Steve Jobs, in the end, nothing could save him. Death can come at any time. And I realized that if I found myself on death’s door, I would regret deeply not having spent more time with my kids when they were…well, kids.
That isn’t to say I will retire or stop working really hard. But at the same time, you know what? I think I can find a better work-life balance. Maybe just 40 hours a week instead. I can use the capital we have to help direct the amazingly talented people we have in the right direction without having to jump into the trenches and help execute every step of the way.
It may mean we’ll release fewer things per year but it also means we’ll have to pick and choose carefully what we do want to focus on and I think, in the longer view, that’s a good thing.
Because no matter how successful you are, you never know when your time is up. And while I admire the accomplishments of Steve Jobs, his biography makes clear, he wishes he had found a better work-life balance.
The random maps are definitely getting better and better. I’d almost have guessed this was made by a person with the inland quasi-island and such.
Here’s another:
Not only is it easier to go through all of Stardock’s programs but many programs you’ve purchased can be re-downloaded directly from the new store, no client required (and we’re adding more all the time).
For years I had my weekly Wednesday pilgrimage to the local comic book store to pick up the latest issues of the comic books I liked. I’m not a collector. I just like reading comic books.
That time, however, is over.
Instead, I use the ComiXology iPad app. And not only is the reading experience superior (due to the way they turn the comics into a quasi-motion comic) but it’s so much easier to go back and re-read a series. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to go back and re-read something only to find I am missing an issue here or there because, when you have thousands of them, they tend to get mixed up.
In the past month, I’ve already spent more with comiXology than I have spent at the local comic book store in the past 2 years. It’s just so convenient and frankly, addicting to just be able to find what you want, click, and start reading.