There are some people who think that the moment someone starts a business that they instantly become greedy, money grubbing corporate robots.  But the reality is, most companies are privately held and those companies do things based on what motivated the stockholders.  In a private company wealth may only be a secondary motivator.

I can say as the principle shareholder in Stardock that accumulating wealth has never been my motivator. I want to do cool stuff. And I consider it my "talent" to be able to generally take things I enjoy doing and be able to do them as part of my "job".  Some things are done strictly because we think they're neat to do even though there's no remote business justification for it (JoeUser.com for instance).  We recently started doing PowerUser.tv too. There's no money to be made in podcasting (unless you're a mega player). But it's fun.

WinCustomize falls into a middle category.  Stardock makes software such as WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX, and so forth.  People who buy that software or are thinking of buying that software will want to see what can be done with it.  So in that sense, having some sort of gallery of content is necessary.  Statistically, most people hear about the software somewhere else or see a screenshot, download the trial version, and THEN start downloading skins after they've purchased it. It's not the other way around -- as a percent, few people discover our software through the skins first.

WinCustomize is a lot more than a skin gallery though.  It's a whole web community.  It's the largest - by far - site dedicated to downloading content to enhance your Windows desktop experience.  With over 22 million monthly visitors, it's one of the largest sites on the net period.  And it's safe to say that of the 22 million visitors, only a tiny tiny % actually have purchased (or will purchase) a Stardock product.

The growth of WinCustomize has been steady.  In December 2004, the site was getting around 14 million visitors per month. In September 2005, it got just about 22 million.  That's a very significant increase for such a short period of time.  Yet subscriptions to the site have declined.  That is, people who pay $20 to support the continued existence of the site and receive a number of (I think) pretty cool services. 

Some people have argued that WinCustomize has no business even trying to get people to buy subscriptions. Since Stardock "owns" it then Stardock should pay for everything because it's a "marketing" expense.  Running a site that gets 22+ million visitors per month is not like running some home page.  It takes rooms of servers and hundreds of megabits PER SECOND.  It also requires an IT staff, database developers and web developers.  You're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in expenses.

As a marketing expense, WinCustomize's value is pretty limited.  After all, DesktopX has been on WinCustomize since its founding and yet the wider world seems completely unaware of its existence.  You hear a lot about Konfabulator.  But little about DesktopX.  Why is that?  There's lots of reasons. But one of the root reasons is a lack of marketing.  A lack of ability to get the word out on DesktopX to get users and developers to try it out.  More developers doing things with it would mean more and better content which in turn would encourage more users to use it.  But in the end, Konfabulator ended up as the program people think of for adding mini-applets to their desktop.  And those who have heard of DesktopX are often unaware that it does a lot more such as build entire desktops and allow for desktop objects.  So how valuable is WC for marketing? Not much.  To be generous, I'd say $50k.  And that's just one example.

But WinCustomize currently costs over $300k per year to exist.  And in a year, it'll likely cost closer to $400k.  Advertising and subscriptions bring the cost down by around $100k. That leaves $200k left.  It WC worth $200k in marketing? Not on your life.  If Stardock had $200k in extra marketing dollars to spend each year, think of all the advertisements, high end PR firms, and community outreach programs it could have invested in?  

The point being, while WinCustomize has some value as a marketing resource, its value is pretty limited. The simple fact is that WinCustomize exists because of what I mentioned at the start -- Stardock, as a private company, can do things simply because it thinks it would be cool.  It cares about the skinning community and it thinks having a site like this is neat and worthwhile -- to a point.  Individuals have hobbies. Private companies have hobbies too (that's a big difference between private companies and publicly held companies).  But just as with personal hobbies, at some point they get too expensive to keep going.

To try to change things, Stardock has brought in two new people right away to help create more incentives for people to subscribe to WinCustomize -- more content for subscribers.  But odds are, things are going to start getting tighter for those who simply visit the site month after month who haven't contributed anything (on WC, skinners, even if they've not subscribed or bought anything are given access so that they are treated as subscribers).

Some things that come to mind:

• People with no accounts will only be able to download things that have been uploaded in the past 48 hours and only 5 megabytes of content.
• People without account will likely see a lot more ads. See www.gamespot.com for a good model.
• People with accounts will be able to download up to 50 megabytes. After that they must become an SD customer or a subscriber.
• People who have purchased a SD product (Object Desktop, CursorXP, etc.) will have unlimited downloads but there will be some skins that will only be available to subscribers.
• SD customers will see fewer ads but they will see some ads.

These are just a few ideas floating around -- ideas submitted by users incidentally -- that we're seriously considering.  Since WC isn't paid for by ads, the # of monthly visitors is not as much of a goal as one might think.  If we could cut our traffic in half, we could probably save around $50k per year in expenses.  Another $50k would likely result from increase SD product purchases and/or subscriptions.  That would be a net difference of $100k.

There are plenty of other good skin sites out there people can visit. Here are a few: http://www.skinbase.org, http://lotsofskins.com, http://skins.deviantart.com/, http://www.skinz.org, http://www.customize.org.

Stardock - the company - needs sites for people to be able to download skins and themes for its software.  But it doesn't have to be WinCustomize.com. Ultimately, if the wider userbase doesn't or can't support WinCustomize as it exists today, then WinCustomize will evolve to be a site that caters more to those who can support it.  The current model for it is unsustainable.

"Having your own business".  It's a phrase I have heard friends and others use.  But what most people think of when they say "Having your own business" is having a business that includes themselves and maybe a couple other guys.

In nearly all cases of companies that have 30 or more employees, the company is founded either by venture capital or through a group of friends/associates who build the business together.

My business I founded on my own.  I didn't have partners.  I don't have investors. And it's reached a size in which it's the operation of the business has become a job unto itself.  When you have 30 some people, it's difficult to keep all aspects together.

Up till this year, I used to pride myself on how low our turn-over was.  I could count on one hand the # of people who had left voluntarily over the first 10 years.  But when you start to have quite a few people, turn-over becomes a percentage. No matter how great your company environment is, you're going to have some % of people leave each year.  I've heard that the typical company turnover rate is 25%.  If you have 35 or so people, that's over 7 people per year.  I can't even imagine what it would do to us to lose 7 people per year.  Even if we keep it down to 10%, that's still over 3 people each year which seems high.

I like the environment that the company has. But I feel like more and more of my time is spent "running the business".  I am working on building up our management team further. But in the meantime, I end up doing a lot of the business development duties which, on top of the software development and project management duties means I'm working between 60 and 80 hours per week.  I just can't keep doing that forever. I have a family. I have two perflect little sons and a wife that I want to spend time with. 

And I don't really care very much about money. Growing up poor has meant that the financial "rewards" of having a company have little meaning. But I can't lower my hours until I build up our management team (particularly in the biz dev area) so that I can work fewer hours.  It's also becoming increasingly apparent that it's difficult to find good biz dev people. People who know how to sell and market but have enough technical knowledge to understand the market and the strengths of our product line.

Oye.  Just rambling basically. 

How are you today?

WinCustomize.com is having a subscription drive. From September 30 to October 31 we are hoping to gain 2,000 new or renewed WinCustomize subscriptions. 

Stardock has hired long-time skinner Mike Bryant who is going to work on creating at least one (probably two) premium suites that will be just for WinCustomize subscribers.  In addition, WishX has been brought on board to help better coordinate efforts between the site development team and the volunteer moderators and administrators so that new features, changes, and bug fixes can be done even faster. 

On top of that, monthly visitors have increased from an average of 14 million at the start of the year to over 22 million now.  Those extra millions of users mean more bandwidth and more servers which is very expensive when you're at that level.

IF we make the 2,000 subscription goal we will also commit to adding some specific new features such as:

1. Subscribers will be able to select their own "skin" for the site.
2. An extra premium suite for subscribers
3. Lots of additional new features for personal pages
4. RSS feeds for select galleries

Presently, a WinCustomize subscription provides:

• No Ads on site
• Two Premium skin suites
• The WinCustomize Browser
• Unlimited Downloads
• A WinCustomize Personal page with your name as part of the domain
• A Personal photo gallery to upload images to.
• And various minor features with more being added regularly.

A WinCustomize subscription costs $19.95 for an entire year.  Renewals cost $19.95 for an additional two-years.  We will be keeping you up to date on the status of the subscription drive.  In order to make 2,000 subscription we have to sell over 60 subscriptions per day.

Some changes are coming to WinCustomize.com.  Big changes.  But before we get to that, for those of you who haven't been here from the start, let me give you a brief history of WinCustomize.com...

...In the beginning the dot-com collapse of 2000 has knocked out many of the sites in our "skinning" community.  Many of us feared that it would be the end of our community. So in early 2001, Stardock quickly put together WinCustomize.com.  The idea at the time was that Stardock would provide the servers and bandwidth and community volunteers would take care of everything else.  That didn't work out so well and within the first month of the site's development, T-Man, a Stardock developer, had been put in charge of the site's development (which he continues to this day) and I came on as the primary administrator.  So that when the site was launched in March 2001, Stardock was taking care of the bandwidth, the servers, site coding, and overall site direction.  However, community volunteers did come to the rescue in the form of people like Jafo (and many others over time) who essentially take care of WinCustomize on a day to day basis.

But over time, the "skin" community has changed.  Despite skinning becoming increasingly popular, no major skin sites have been launched since 2001 (other customization-oriented sites have launched but no major gallery sites).  Moreover, since 2001, some of the existing skin sites have essentially gone on auto-pilot.  The skinning community, at its prime, was something to behold.  But it is not what it once was in my opinion. It is fractured and dispersed.

Meanwhile, traffic at WinCustomize.com has continued to grow and grow:

   
Figure 1: Traffic per month

At the same time, the # of subscriptions per month has declined and declined:

Figure 2: Subscriptions per month

So as a community of sites, we're at a cross-roads.  As someone who wants the skinning community (people who like to create and use "stuff" to alter the way their computer interfaces look & feel) to thrive, I want to do something that can help the community return to where it was.  But I'm also in the position of being in charge of Stardock.  The business case on WinCustomize has always been pretty weak.  The most profitable thing to do historically has been to close WinCustomize and just point to deviantART libraries of skins and themes for Stardock's software.  But at this point, closing WinCustomize.com would be a true last resort because a single site, deviantART, which is primarily an art site now, not a skin site, would have a virtual monopoly on skinning content (that's not to take away from Skinbase and other very good skin sites, but we're talking purely in terms of monthly traffic).

We're at a cross-roads then.  We have to get WinCustomize to a point where it can pay for itself.  I think the key to this is helping bring the skinning community back to its prime.  That means more community features, more galleries, more bandwidth, more programming, more of everything.  But to do this, it's going to cost money. Even with the people who volunteer, we still have to code the site, pay the bandwidth and the size of the site means that we need more people who's jobs are dedicated to the site.

So we've brought on two new people: Mike Bryant who many of you know.  He'll be creating some exclusive suites this year for WinCustomize subscribers.  We also have brought on WishX to help organize and keep the sites running, to interface more directly with the community volunteers.  And we hope to hire more ASP.net and SQL database developers to add in new features for people.  But to do this it's going to cost money. A lot of money.  Stardock writes most of the cost of WinCustomize off as "marketing".  But even today, WinCustomize costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to run.  These changes are going to add dramatically to that cost. 

So later today, we're going to launch a subscription drive.  Our hope is to get 2,000 new (or renewed) subscribers between now and October 31st.  We'll be keeping you all informed of our progress. With 22 million visitors (over 3 million of whom are unique), getting 2,000 people to subscribe or renew shouldn't be a major problem we hope.  But we'll see.  We'll have more details on the subscription drive and what subscribers will be getting for sure and what they'll get IF we make the 2,000 goal.

Holy cow are things going fast now.  Up till now, it's been engine building. And even now, it's still engine building. But now we're starting to get into gameplay features which are far more fun.

Fleets are in. Totally in. Of course, at the AI guy, I have to get the AI to effectively use them.  I just finished working on the AI's handling of the planetary improvements.  The planet surface code is all done with STL which I'm a bit sketchy with.  So my first crack at it was a bit weak.  This time, it's better. Not great. But better.  The AI doesn't know how to upgrade its planetary improvements yet. I will have to go through and do that.  That's going to be interesting to do.

It's easy to write fast AI code. And it's easy to write really smart AI code.  But it's really hard to write fast and smart AI code.  And that's the conumdrum I always have.  For instance, in GalCiv I, my biggest beef was that the AI didn't update its ship orders between turns. That is, if you moved your ship, the AI couldn't attack it because it "moved".  That was because of the time it would take for the AI to "update" its ships.  This time, I'm going to fix that.  CPUs are faster and I'll use that extra processing power there.

Another thign I'm going to do is completely re-do the way the AI goes to war.  Fleets change things a lot and make things potentially easier.  I have my fears about the balancing of the weapons techs still but since I do that too, at least I can tweak that myself as I discover exploits. 

The way the AI did war in GalCiv I was based on a military concept of projections of force.  I would identify a sector I wanted to militarily control and then figure out how many ships I needed to control it and send them in there.  The problem came in when trying to coordinate my groups of ships.  In a tiny or small galaxy, the AI ships woudl come in groups quite nicely.  Since I was running in the debugger (Which is much slower), I tended to play the game on very small galaxy sizes and the result was nice.  But as you moved up in size, the ships had more and more of a problem getting to the target at the same time.  As a result, ships would come in dribs which looked like, to me and our critics, as the usual "death march" of lame AI that we've seen for decades. 

But with GalCiv II, I've got better tools.  First, Altarian Prophecy introduced the Rally Point system.  The AI, thanks to the "not cheating" design, can make use of the same stuff as humans and vice versa since the engine doesn't make a distinction between players.  So the AI can set up rally points on ships to move together.  And now with the fleet code, I can group them together more easily.  I am also going to add in code so that even if I don't build fleets (due to lack of logistics units for instance) I will set a "slower" speed for ships that can't keep up so that when you're attacked, you know it. They come in waves of massive fleets.

I'm also going to put more work into having the AI clue the player in on what it's thinking.  There's a lot of calculations the AI does that humans don't even know about that could make the game more exciting.

We're starting to move forware more on the tech tree.  I hope people like our philosphy on it.  In GalCiv I, it was based on the OS/2 version of the tech tree which was based on the tech tree not being tightly coordinated with the rest of the game.  In GalCiv II, the techs  tie into something in the game. So it's much more linear.  You have techs called Plasma Weapons IV for instance (as opposed to "Advanced Phase Induction" or something like that).  You research a technology because you want something specific out of it.  So there's a lot fewer essoteric techs in there.

I sure hope people like the fleet battles. I think they're cool. But I think some people are going to think "Why can't I control my ships?".  It's a playback of the battle, not a tactical battle element.  I hate tactical battles in strategy games.  Hate them.  The reason is that they're so time consuming. I am the guy who always pressed "Auto" in Master of Orion.  But I also knew that I wasn't playing the game optimally by doing that because the AI is never going to be as good as a skilled player at tactical combat.  Our combat system is essentially like a forced "auto" of the MOO 2 thing except with 2005 3D graphics.  If you watch a battle in cinematic view, it's a lot like watching a battle from Star Trek TNG.

Speaking of MOO, people who only played MOO need to remember -- GalCiv isn't Master of Orion.  GalCiv for OS/2 was a contemporary of MOO 1 for DOS back years ago.   GalCiv I was in public beta back in 1993.  It's a different game.  As much as I like the MOO series, I don't want GalCiv to be MOO. 

There were 3 points from MOO1/2 that I particularly don't want to emulate (and bear in mind, I'm a huge MOO2 fan, I played MOO2 in the delivery room waiting for my first born -- true story):

1. MOO 1/2 always ended in a genocide race. Each side collected huge fleets and then just wiped out each other's planets so it was a race to see who killed off the other.
2. MOO 1/2 had tactical combat which I really don't like in a strategy game.  If I want tactical combat (And sometimes I do) then I'll play Homeworld which does it very well.
3. MOO 1/2 had starlanes.  I like free-form maps. It worked for MOO since you're parking fleets around.  But in a free form map like GalCiv, you have to limit fleet sizes and distribute up military power.

So while I sympathize that many MOO 1/2 fans are looking for a MOO 4, GalCiv isn't designed to be it.   It has its own set of strengths and weaknesses that make it a unique gaming experience.

Anyway, Beta 4 should be out before Halloween.  It'll be still a beta (read: buggy and incomplete) but it'll be well on its way to final by then. It's not quite fun IMO yet, but it's getting there.  Beta 4 will be open to those who pre-ordered the game.

 

Desert Fox over at Neotech gaming has a screenshot of Galactic Civilizations II with a super zoomed in picture of our latest colony ship texture.  This isn't a cut-scene, this is a zoom in of in-game graphics -- i.e. zoom out from a galaxy view down to this.

The first public beta of WindowBlinds 5 is almost here.  Stardock released the alpha this week to its internal QA team to put the program through its compatibility testing before sending it out.  WindowBlinds 5's most notable new feature is the ability to support "glass" and full alpha blending of the title bar and border (no more jaggy borders).  The critical step has been to deliver this functionality without affecting performance for reasonably modern video cards.

In addiion, WindowBlinds 5 no longer has a "wbload.exe" and instead extends the painting of the Windows GUI in a more "native" way.  Or put another way, it has "zero foot print" in the same manner that the default bundled Windows themes (msstyles) use. 

Users who have Object Desktop will be able to try out the beta next Tuesday (Oct 4).  Users of WindowBlinds 4 will be able to upgrade to Object Desktop at a reduced price.  Moreover, users who purchased WindowBlinds 4 after September 1 will receive WindowBlinds 5 for free.

WindowBlinds 5 will also be designed to run on Windows Vista natively by the time Windows Vista ships (the beta of WindowBlinds 5 should run on the beta of Windows Vista though the Windows Vista GUI is still in a state of flux obviously).

The new Treo 700W has been announced and is using a version of Microsoft's Windows mobile.  For years, PalmOS and Microsoft's mobile OS (Window CE, PocketPC, etc.) have battled for the hearts and minds of users.  Palm's Colligan, in full Lucutus mode stated "If you've been in this business long enough, you know that partners sometimes compete and competitors sometimes partner."

Palm did not discuss how it will use the Palm OS in conjunction with the new hardware it showed off Monday. But the company has said it plans to continue developing products, including smart phones, based on the Palm OS.

Full story over at CNET.

 

Last week I was at PDC getting the latest news on what Microsoft is working on. 

And for those interested in self-torture, you can hear my report on PowerUser.tv in a special Friday segment.

The full new episode will be on Monday with the entire PowerUser.tv gang.