Stardock's new product "WinStyles" has recently come to my attention, and I have some major fundamental problems with it. I am posting this in a public forum so that everyone's thoughts and ideas on this are in one centralized location. To sum up my feelings, before I go into detail, let me put it like this: WinStyles acts as a vending machine for all of your work.

That sounds harsh, I know. However, think about that for a moment, and I believe you will get my point. By simply creating a pack of skins for download, each individual author loses nearly all credit for their work, and they'll lose a good portion of the comments and feedback they might receive due to their skin simply being packaged with 10 others. Their skin is simply part of a group now, and all individuality of it is lost. The user sees the work, uses it, but it all ends here. Thus, WinStyles is a virtual vending machine for skins. This is a big, big problem.

This program hurts everyone, including you. It hurts the artists by eliminating individual feedback from the people who download their work, and as a result stunting their growth as an artist. Many artists are greatly dependent on comments to improve their work, and this is a key point of most skin sites; without these comments, the community will come to a basic stand still. It also hurts the artist by removing the majority of recognition. By looking for skins individually you see the person's name, can easily view their profile and see other skins they have uploaded, and get a much more personal feel of things. Granted the author has to give permission for their work to be in a WinStyles suite, it still does not resolve any of the above issues.

It hurts the skin sites (such as WinCustomize and DeskMod) by reducing the overall interaction, not to mention the page views. Comments will go down, downloads will drop on everything besides the WinStyle suites, and the whole point of the site will slowly crumble. Although something of this catastrophic level is not likely, this program certainly enables the possibility. The whole sense of community greatly deteriorates, and that really will hurt the sites.

In addition to all of that, you are also hurt. No longer are you able to easily view other work by the artists because you do not go directly to the page with their upload. You do not have the opportunity to make contact with the artists, leave your opinions, or further contribute to the community. This really hurts the overall experience of going to a skin site, and being part of the community. Those reading this certainly know that.

Last, but definitely not least, this hurts application developers. All of a sudden, their program loses its identity. No longer do you have to change the skin through the application itself, now you simply use a Stardock program to change it all. Imagine how many people will think to themselves "I made my desktop look pretty with WinStyles", this removes lots of appreciation for the individual applications. This is very similar to the appreciation for the artist that I talked about previously. Although this is probably one of the smaller implications of this type of a program, it is certainly not one to ignore.

Overall, I can understand why Stardock would think this is a good idea, but I personally feel the negatives outweigh the positives. It makes things easy, but it causes many problems while doing so. Granted this is a great way for Stardock to increase awareness of their brand, in return it does the exact opposite for applications that it skins. If this program really gets big, it will ultimately ruin the community.

Thank you,
David Gorman
DeskMod