Some various pictures of the family...
Quickie picture
Wife Deb in the car
Alex
Ryan
Alex with little snowman
We used up all our snow to make the snowman!
In 2002 we had the GUI Olympics. It was a contest to see who could create the best user interface designs for the Windows GUI. The tool used was WindowBlinds to apply them. The contest was a huge success. Something over 100 skins were submitted. But while the contest was a huge hit, running it was an absolute nightmare. The politics behind the scenes nearly brought it all to a screeching halt.
The near-disaster should have been easy for us to predict but we were a bit naive on such things. You see, the contest was an inter-site contest. That is, each of the major skin sites had a judge. The gotcha was that the skinners had to choose to represent one of these sites. And the money ($10k in cash/prizes were given out) from this contest was split between the author and the site. So you can see the problem - the people judging actually had a potential financial conflict of interest.
Meanwhile, add to that the classic issue of who is in charge? Stardock, who sponsored it, felt it should have the final say since it was providing the prizes, running the website, and running the day to day contest. But some of the smaller sites felt that they should have an equal say in every decision. This included requests for post-facto changes to the rules. At one point, a group of the smaller sites banded together and demanded that none of the judges be appointed by Stardock. This would have essentially meant that the only ones who could judge the contest were those who had a financial stake in the outcome. Stardock rejected this and two skin sites dropped out of the contest.
The net result was that a couple "Teams" dominated the entire contest (deviantART and LotsOfSkins). To spectators and contestants, this was no big deal. You really only need 2 reasonably equal contenders to make it an exciting competition. And in the end, deviantART won 18 medals, LotsOfSkins won 10 mdeals, and VelocityArt 9 medals. So despite some half-baked ideas on how to run the contest, it all worked out well and people have been asking for a new GUI Olympics ever since.
It was 2 years ago this April that the last GUI Olympics was finished. And so here we are again, 2 years later and things have changed remarkably since then. For one thing, back then there was an ongoing battle between the "old guard" of "community leaders" of skinning who had wanted to keep skinning a small, private hobby. As one of them put it at the time, "This is our scene, we created it, we don't want it turned into some mass-market, would you like fries with your happy meal phenomenon!". And on the other side, there was the "new guard" whose response would have been "Yea, we want skinning and customization to be a mass-market, everyone and their brother should be trying it out." And so behind the scenes this battle was waged. The old guard has since faded away as skinning became mainstream.
Where skinning was a tiny niche hobbyist thing
before, it has grown and grown. Three "new guard" sites: WinCustomize,
deviantART, and Neowin have grown massively in terms of number of users.
deviantART, in fact, moved beyond merely spreading skinning to the masses to
helping make art itself something that everyone could take a shot at. And for
good and ill, these two sites now get over 6 million unique visitors per month
between them -- more than all the other sites in the "community" combined.
And Neowin went from being a niche tech site to being possibly the world's most popular technology forum. It has become not just a hub for skinning but one that has opened up customization to the average users. In terms of actual quality skin creation, it has become immensely popular and likely to be a real force this time around. If there were any old guard people still active, they would say that WinCustomize, deviantART, and Neowin have let in the "riff raff" in which mediocrity prevails, originality quashed and skinners focused on making popular skins and themes rather than new and fresh ones.
But no matter how you slice it, the times have dramatically changed. Skinning has become mass market. Look at the table above and the stats make it clear. The rankings of every customization-related site that was involved in the GUI Olympics 2002 has dramatically improved except for Teknidermy which was, at the time, the core old guard center of things.
Skinning as a niche is gone, it's mainstream now. Countless programs these days are coming skinned. Microsoft made Windows XP be skinnable to a degree. Longhorn boasts of having all kinds of new customization features in the pipeline. Stardock is making almost as much selling DirectSkin at $10k a pop to companies to skin their applications as it does selling WindowBlinds to end users for $19.95 a piece. Skin authors themselves are now making thousands of dollars annually making professional skins. The recent Zippo Lighter Suite is just one example. Professional skin authors have made skins used by Microsoft, ATI, nVidia, Nintendo, and countless other companies. Another reason why this would be a good opportunity for someone to try their hand at skinning using industry accepted standards like WindowBlinds.
And so it makes sense that the GUI Olympics 2004 would expand too. Expand and be run fundamentally differently...
This time around, skinners will be able to form their own teams. They don't have to represent any particular site (though they can). The winning team will get a $500 bonus prize. A team can be merely a group of guys with no particular affiliation other than each other. They just have to create a logo and form a team. When the GUI Olympics gets going in March, contestants will be able to create and join teams. Teams can be websites. They just don't have to be this time around.
There will be 3 categories this time:
Visual Styles (must be provided in WindowBlinds format)
Icon Packages (IconPackager format)
A MP3 player (to be announced soon)
There will be 6 judges. 4 appointed by Stardock and 2 appointed by the company that sponsors the third category.. Of the 4 appointed by Stardock, 1 will be Paul Boyer, who works at Stardock now and is considered the leading Windows icon author (since he can't compete in the icon creation portion it makes sense to have him judge). Another will be Kris Kwilas who has been a GUI expert for nearly a decade. The other two judges from Stardock will come from the community.
In addition, there will be 3 moderators. Think American Idol. These 3 moderators will weed out skins, icons, and player skins that don't have a chance to keep the final total reasonable. It just means a skin or set of icons that contains ripped material or is incomplete or is just plain terrible won't be allowed in. The moderators won't be judges though, they just get to give a yay or nay to the submissions as they come in.
All skins and icons must be new. They can't be something that's existed on any other site previously. They also must be exclusive to the GUI Olympics (i.e. you can't go uploading them around the net). Once the contest is officially started (early March) there will be approximately one month of submissions before the various events even begin to be judged so there will be plenty of time to put together the skins and/or icons.
We expect each category to have between 3 and 5 events.
The visual style events will include: Best OS-like skin (not an OS skin, but an original OS concept that one would say "Now that would be a good OS skin!". Most Creative Skin (that is, one that doesn't look like every other skin ever made out there but still looks nice). Most Minimalistic Skin. Best PowerUser Skin. Best Overall Skin.
The Icon packages one would be: Best OS-like icons (see above). Most Original Icons. Best overall Icons.
The MP3 player categories will be influenced by the sponsor but are likely to be: Most Creative Skin. Best PowerUser skin. Best Overall Skin.
Plus one final event: Best overall submission.
Additional Awards: Most Valuable Player and Winning Team
Overall, we're looking at 12 events. 12 events competing for $10,000 cash and prizes. Prizes will include hardware, software, shirts, and possibly trophies (we're looking into that).
Each major customization site will be able to have a flag posted on the top of the GUIOlympics.com page in exchange for the GUI Olympics logo being put prominently on their site during the the contest.
The contest will get officially announced soon. We just have to make sure things are set for the third category (it's a large company) as well as get prize sponsors all together. But this is a head's up of what is coming.
But for those who do feel that skinning has become so mainstream that skinners now top themselves in seeing who can create the most mild looking skins out there, this is an opportunity to stretch your talents out. The most "Creative" skin is unlikely to go to someone making a "Luna-like" visual style (WindowBlinds supports buttons on the sides and bottom as well as the standard top right position), today's media players are almost infinitely customizable.
It's going to be blast!
Good luck to everyone!
This month kicks off the first official month of Stardock TV. Each month we'll be demoing some skinnable program and showing you what we can do with it.
This month we're showing off the widget features of DesktopX 2.1! Check it out at SDTV.Joeuser.com
| Stardock TV: February 2004 | |
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This month's Stardock TV is a 15 minute demo of DesktopX 2.1's object features. Now, anyone with DesktopX installed can make use of widgets created by other DesktopX users just like they could any other program.
Stardock
TV: February 2004 (requires Windows Media Player 9)
IBM is working on migrating MS's Office 2003 over to Linux. Details are sketchy on how this is being done but but if it becomes a reality, it would be a major step forward to getting Linux on desktops.
Source: Neowin.net
When I speak on-line on various sites, including JoeUser.com about the role of government, it becomes apparent quickly that many people think of the government as some sort of independent entity that is not connected to us. Those people tend to favor having the government solve all kinds of problems, including problems better left to individuals to solve for themselves.
People like me, as I discussed in the philosophies of the left and the right are wary of having the government do anything that we could be doing for ourselves. The reason for that is because we recognize that the government is us. When the government does something, we're basically paying money to have someone else do it. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer runs for sanitation commissioner. His campaign slogan is "Can't someone else do it?" He promises that the garbage men will take care of everything from emptying the litter box to changing diapers. Of course, after he's elected he puts his program in action and quickly runs out of money. It was hilarious and yet it had a point - no one is going to be as efficient at taking care of you as you are. Sure, we can pay someone else to change our litter box but it'll cost a lot more for the government to do it than it would for you to do it yourself.
In a country in which half the adult population effectively pays no federal taxes, it becomes pretty tempting to vote in programs that take care of all kinds of things we could do ourselves. Programs that involve literally giving money to other people are, in essence, asking other individuals to pay for something for someone else. When people demand universal coverage to be paid for by "the government" what they are really asking for is their neighbors pay for their health care. Oddly, I have seen few movements to try to start health care charities. How many people who support government health care would be willing to go door to door asking their neighbors to chip in to pay for their own health care?
Or let me be even more explicit: Federal taxes represent days of the year that you work exclusively for the federal government. Let's say you pay 30% of your taxes to the federal government. That's about 120 days. 4 months. January, February, March, April . Those are the 4 months that you work exclusively for the federal government. When you start looking at it like that, you start to view things a bit differently.
When someone throws up their hands and says "let's have the government do this" they are really asking the 50% of the adult population who pays taxes to do it for them. We already, for example, work 2 weeks each year just paying the interest on the debt. Isn't that nice? And because the government is so wasteful, the 50% who pay taxes end up working more days for the government than would have been necessary otherwise.
You say you like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare? Well, if you're like me, you are already working 50 days each year to pay for it. Imagine what you could do if those 7 weeks of income were instead put into some sort of private saving's account or a mutual fund or heck, saved towards buying a house? But instead, it goes to social security and unfortunately, it's a rotten investment for most of us. How rotten, how about this: If you were to pay say $5,000 per year from age 20 to 30 and then never pay another cent after that into savings, at an annual investment rate of 7% (a little less than the S&P 500 average) then at age 65 you would have around $600,000. Let's say you you received payments over the next 30 years (until you were 95) from it. That would be over $20,000 per year for 30 year! And remember, this is with eliminating saving even one penny more after you turned 30. Most people would likely continue to save something for retirement, this just illustrates how extremely wasteful Social Security et al is. Instead, we pay and pay and pay and for what? A bunch of little checks that had made no interest at all. And why? Because a bunch of people successfully argued that we should just throw up our hands and let the government take care of retirement for us. And so now we work 2 months each year for the government for the rest of our non-retired lives so that we can get a bunch of little checks.
Of course, the counter to this, which is valid, is that these programs help the sick, the poor, and the unfortunate. I think most people are willing to work several days each year to help them. Unfortunately while supporting the sick, poor, and unfortunate we also support the lazy, the foolish, and the unscrupulous. And it is very hard for the government to make a distinction between the two groups. Which is precisely why so many Americans, such as myself, oppose programs that replace individualism with collectivism. If it's something we could really do for ourselves, then it's probably better to do ourselves. And to protect the sick, the poor, and the unfortunate private institutions or at worse the state and local governments are better off doing that -- because they are much better equipped to tailor their programs to the needs of their constituents than some far off bureaucrat.
I am okay with the current tax system - if I make more, I can afford to pay more. I'm fine with that. What I am against is a system in which we give up personal responsibility to ourselves and our community to some far off government bureaucrat who will never be able to do the job as efficiently as we could do for ourselves.
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Some of the top graphics designers in the world have got combined their efforts to create some incredible suites of skins, icons, and themes. Check them out here: |
Stardock is a very profitable company. But I hate to say it, but we could be immensely more profitable than we are if we were just willing to do things we don't think people would like.
For instance, our site, WinCustomize, is the world's most popular skin site. But it loses money every month. It doesn't even come close to paying for itself. At the same time, it has to compete against websites whose skins install spyware. Needless to say, they make a lot more money than us.
Occasionally we get offers from companies to pay us 10 to 15 cents per installation of our freeware and shareware programs if we agree to also install their software. Their software being spyware of various types. Oh, how could anyone be tempted to do that? Well, last week our software got 167,000 downloads just on Download.com (not counting other places). That would be (if we use the 10 cent figure) $16,700 per week. Let's say it was only $15,000 for easier math, that's roughly $60,000 per month. $780,000 per year. Gets a bit more tempting then.
But we decline those offers.
A lot of people speak of holding principles, but it gets a lot tougher to uphold those principles when "Big money" is put in front of you. Principles, they say, are a luxury. Perhaps so. We're already profitable. How would things be if it were a choice between laying 8 people off or doing the sort of thing I mention above? 8 people with families to take care of. I suspect it would be a lot tougher then.
But still, even now we find ourselves regularly competing on an unequal playing field. We have one competitor who installs a MacOS X skin as their default skin complete with Apple's trademark as part of the skin. The graphics themselves appear to have been lifted right from MacOS X 10.3. On the other hand, the skins we include with our software are created by skin authors. We include a Mac classic skin because Apple's legal gave us the okay on that -- but we made it ourselves, we didn't go and copy the resource bitmaps from MacOS 9 or something. Not including a MacOS X skin puts us at a disadvantage but we're trying to abide by Apple's wishes. It's their stuff. Still, I wonder how many sales we lose each year because of that decision? I wonder how many sales our competitor gets at our expense because they can claim their software will make "Windows look like a Mac" upon install?
Another example, we're putting together a desktop aquarium. Our animators got the models from a website in Japan. Now, realistically, we could in all likelihood just use those make new models that are derivative and create new graphics and no one would ever know. But instead we contacted the author and put together a contract in which we pay him thousands of dollars, up front, to use his models. Why? Because it's the right thing to do. It's as simple as that.
But again, in the real business world, such actions put us at a competitive disadvantage. Many companies only worry about whether something is legal as opposed to whether it's moral. We have a company suing us right now to force us to let them use the files generated by one of our programs. Files we created. They want to use them so that they can compete against us. Forget for a moment whether such an action is legal, I can't see how anyone can say it's moral.
But that's how so many businesses we run into operate, the only question is whether it's legal. And if it's not legal, they just ask themselves if they can get away with it? I've been asked over the years why we play so straight and narrow? Why do we operate so transparently? Someone usually presupposes, "Do you do it so that you can look at yourself in the mirror?" No. That's not why we do it. I guess you could say I believe in the power of projection. That we simply operate in a way that we wish everyone else operated. And maybe, just maybe in some small way others will see our success and see that they don't have to go into that gray area to succeed.
Still, $700,000 to $1 million more in revenue -- revenue that would go straight to the bottom line, would be nice. And all we'd need to do is install spyware. And heck, while we were doing that, we could have all our skins and themes that are downloaded from our sites do the same thing, get that amount up to 2 or 3 million dollars per year.
But you know what? I'd rather be part of the way things should be. Even if other companies don't necessarily operate that way.
