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Stardock got ill, has it gotten better yet?

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Stardock got ill, has it gotten better yet?

an attempt at a reasoned discussion

from WinCustomize Forums
Before I begin I want to point out that this is not designed as a pointless rant. I have considered this, and decided that it is beneath me, even though it is tempting.

Now first things first, my relevant experience, which is important since I feel it entitles me to make the rest of this post. My day job is as a professional computer programmer, and this has been the case for quite a few years now. As a result I feel I know something about the process of software development and testing.

My evening job is basically tech support, and has been for over a year now, so I definitely know something about the process of dealing with bug reports, customers, and strange problems.

In the beginning when I first discovered Stardock I was a happy customer. The software did what I wanted, and when it broke, or I broke it, fixes were normally not to long in arriving. True not all problems were easily fixed, but via the excellent newsgroups I was able to communicate with knowledgeable people at Stardock, get problems confirmed, or at least considered, and get a sense that things were moving along nicely.

Somewhere along the line this seemed to slowly die away, until it became no more. At the point when I let my Object Desktop subscription lapse (and I used to be one of many fanatical customers who would go out there and recommend Stardock, based in large part on their wonderful support) things had gone from bad, to worse, to basically a farce.

Strong words, but I spent *months* trying to get Stardock to recognise that deleting half of the installed Window Blinds skins off of my computer was a bad idea. Perhaps I am biased, but I would have thought that "leave the customers data alone" would be a basic premise all sensible computer companies would adhere to. You might argue that having some unimportant skins deleted does not matter, but if the skin you are currently using is deleted... ever tried to use windows when there are no title bars, buttons or borders?

I am sad to say that the whole experience with Stardock support became very unsatisfactory. I know what makes a good bug report, so I would send in detailed steps to reproduce a bug, including plenty of screen shots, normally having confirmed the bug on at least two independent computers. In short I gave them everything they could possibly need on a plate.

Now I am prepared to admit that perhaps I was using a very rare combination of components that no normal person would use, so lets just pick one big bug that I sent many emails about. It required:

* notepad - a fairly common program I hope you will agree
* the keyboard, specifically the alt key - perhaps modern computers do not ship with keyboards?

Nope, try as I might, I cannot convince myself that the software and hardware is so unique that the bug can be safely ignored.

Yes I sound bitter and sarcastic, it had something to do with spending over 6 months banging my head against this bug in Window Blinds.

Now to be fair when I asked Stardock support they could just answer (it happened once, it was about registry keys to control winFX) I got an immediate and helpful answer. So I know that the problem is not that there is no support. I don't know what the problem is, but anything involving software bugs seems to be a large part of it.

My understanding always was that you can and do expect bug fixes to the OD programs during your subscription period. It seemed to me that this was true, so long as the program was called "DesktopX". Perhaps I just preferred the odd little bits?

Tab Launchpad - this was such a wonderful program, and I had such little success getting it fixed that I gave up and wrote "feline_launcher". You can probably guess what this does by the name. When I wrote my program I had to include code to work around a Window Blinds bug. I did consider emailing Stardock support, but lets be honest, the Qt programming toolkit is not quite as widely used as notepad, so I never found the energy to bother.

Keyboard Launchpad - if I had the time I would re-write this. It is nearly there but there are enough problems and bugs that it drives me up the wall when I have to look at the options. Having it list the wrong keyboard shortcut for one action is probably the biggest bug. I think you can see why I would consider this a bug rather than some odd feature.

Ultimately my current and enduring frustration is with Object Bar. It has been recognised for years, and it has to be years now, that trayserver.exe is an approach that just does not work properly. This is sad, and I lived through the efforts to fix it, so I know we tried.

In late December 2004 it was announced all over the front page of Wincustomize that Object Bar 2 was nearly ready for release. Finally there was good news! I even entertained the hope that the long list of bugs I had confirmed (but never heard back about) with Object Bar 1.6 would be addressed.

The first beta of OB2 was a disaster for me, lacking several key features. Again I am going to go out on a limb here and say that removing key features is not a good definition of "moving forward".

Now it is September 2005 and still there is no sign of Object Bar 2. I will refrain from comment here, but the inference should be clear.

One final direct point, Stardock used to email me every now and then wanting me to purchase some software group for controlling multiple computers. So, you want me to give you money for software that is key to getting my job done...

Currently I already have TabLaunchpad, Keyboard Launchpad and Object Bar in this class. Given a total failure to reply to or address most of my bug report emails, and an even bigger failure to actually fix bugs in the software why on earth would I consider risking my productivity with productivity enhancing software from Stardock?

All of which lead me to conclude that Stardock was ill, and to let my OD subscription lapse. It would be nice to learn that Stardock has gotten better since, so have they? I have quite a lot of bugs I would like to see fixed, most of them in supposedly "core" OD products, Window Blinds being one of them!

Please, intelligent replies only I can rant quite well on my own without help, but that is not going to help anyone here.

Should the consensuses be that Stardock are still deeply ill, does anyone know of an alternate program I can use instead of Object Bar? It has to be one that actually gets updated and fixed, before anyone suggests a 3 year old dead product. I have one of those installed already.
15,535 views 33 replies
Reply #26 from WinCustomize Forums Top

* updates to stardock central *used to* delete trayserver.exe, this has been confirmed by various people in the object bar news groups and via email from stardock. hopefully this stopped happening somewhere along the line

* installing a WB beta upgrade on top of an existing WB release install would delete all WB skins that were bundled with the WB release, but which were not bundled with the WB beta. i emailed in the WB upgrade logs showing this in action, and it was confirmed as a bug in an email from stardock. again hopefully this stopped happening somewhere along the line.

a current problem with keyboard launchpad (reporting as 1.00.001) the action "open my computer" is listed in the config screen as "WinKey + '", which is fine, except for the minor point that the actual keyboard shortcut is "WinKey + #". a minor point, until you forget one of your more obscure keyboard shortcuts and have to look it up. this is likely to effect all international customers - i am in England and have a language and keyboard layout for England.

there was a much more obscure problem with KLP if you write your own KLP plugins (i did, as part of an effort to give something back) and they take time to execute. the problem happened when getting KLP to dial my old 56k modem, and also to run my firewall. understandably i wanted these to happen in a given order, but due to the "lets sort the interface" in KLP i had to get feedback from a highly frustrated Jeff to find out what was going on. here i will admit that this is the sort of problem you don't want to hear about, but it drove me up the wall!


if you want *very* detailed bug reports, confirmed on two or more different machines, with screen shots, and key press by key press details of what to do then i am there for you, i have done this, on many occasions. however when they seem to drop into a black hole, and release after release of the program still has the problem is it any wonder that i get fed up?

i am aware that i have stopped being totally fair, balanced and rational in my perspective. but when i head butt "it doesn't work properly" bugs in OD software day in and day out, bugs that i can and do report in mind numbing detail, can you see why my passion and interest gets a bit dull
if you really feel that my perspective is totally unreasonable then perhaps you are right. i am certainly *not* saying i am without fault here. but at the same time Stardock is a company that for years i held up as having legendary support!

Let me first say that software support can best be described as a "triage" type system.  Since no product or service is perfect, the number of people having problems will always be greater than 0.

Stardock's "defect" goal on software is typically around 99%.  That is, 99 out of 100 users will not run into any problems with a given product.  Back in say 2000, 1 person in 100 users meant that support involved helping around 50 people per day.  As a result, issues that one might consider obscure today could still be resolved because the development team had a lot fewer items to triage.

Now, fast forward to 2005 and 1 person out of 100 means 1,000 people per day.  And dev teams don't scale linearly.  It's not like the Keyboard LaunchPad team has 20 people on it today instead of 1. Worse, some components of Object Desktop get more use than others.  WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX, SkinStudio, for instance, get a lot more "hard core" users than ObjectBar or RightClick or Keyboard LaunchPad.  That is, poeple who really take them apart.  Keyboard LaunchPad, for instance, works pretty well. We all use it here and it works great.  But you have problems.

And so those problems get cataloged and prioritized.  I happen to know for a fact that over the years you've received plenty of one-on-one attention from the actual developer of a given component.  You above refer to talking to Jeff about the issue you have with Keyboard LaunchPad.  But then you turn around and make a post like this making it out that we don't acknowledge bugs or support our products.  Do you think you'd get to talk to the development lead of some part at Microsoft? Symantec?  The user base of Object Desktop today is in the same league as some of the products as Symantec.  Hundreds of thousands of users (not counting the millions using free or shareware versions).  And yet we still have put together a system in which customers, such as yourself, get to talk to the dev leads.

The problem is that we have to focus on bugs and enhancements based on # of people they affect as well as the # of people who find the issue to be a real problem.  For instance, Stardock Central resetting the default WB skins to their standard level is not, in our view, a bug.  It decreases support.  Someone who is modifying those skins could simply save them as a differently named skin enirely. We want to ensure that the default skins in WB are exactly what we have on our server.  Otherwise, you get some user who emails us "WB doesn't work, my <skin name here> is missing a button" only to find out that the user had messed with it in SkinStudio at some point and forgot. 

Similarly, your Keyboard LaunchPad issue is not something readily fixable and not something that can't be easily worked around.  It doesn't mean that it shouldn't be fixed but at the same time, Jeff is also the dev lead on ObjectBar.  So when he's spending an hour or two trying to resolve your intenrational keyboard issue with the WinKey + # he's not working on ObjectBar which you also object to its lateness and quality. 

So you might say, "Hire some more developers to work on ObjectBar!" Then the problem arrises in pricing.  Object Desktop in 1999 (its initial release) was 5 programs that cost $50.  Today, it's 30 components and still $50.  We could raise the price to $69.95 (the next logical price point) but then you start having to deal with the "competition" and their prices which brings in the last part of the support thing.  Stardock's support is, you must admit, pretty extensive.  Online support in various forms, phone support, forum discussions, FAQs, the entire Stardock Central infrastructure, WinCustomize, etc.  But we have to compete on price with companies that have basically no support at all.  For $20 there's Style XP which doesn't even have forums.  For $25 there's Hoverdesk which hasn't been updated in going on 3 years.  We have Konfabulator which is free now and owned by Yahoo. And of course you've got msstyles which are free and have no support at all.  People buy on price first, support is a distant second. So we have to live with the price we have and compete against competitors that offer no real support.

That is why I suggested that I don't think you should buy Stardock products in the future if you truly feel the support you've received is inadequate.  Because a customer who has gotten to talk with multiple internal lead developers on programs multiple times over the years that still thinks we have bad support is not going to ever be satisifed.  At a certain point we have to say "Sorry, but we can't afford to support you."  Really large companies have support contracts at $50 an hour for support or maintaincen contracts with companies for tens of thousands of dollars per year.  That's the kind of support I think you're looking for and we just can't provide that on a $50 program.  All I can say is that I wish we could provide you the  level of suppport you desire, but we can't.  Not at $50.  As soon as a customer emails us on a tech problem (or worse, phones us), we've essentially lost money on the sale. The margins are that slim.

Reply #27 from WinCustomize Forums Top
instead of trying to address points one by one i will try to address these points in "broad terms".

firstly i honestly am *not* trying to insult stardock, but at the same time i have become *very* frustrated. one intention here is to try and ask if i am frustrated because *unrealistic* goals have not been met? perhaps i need to go and sit in a corner and say nothing when i feel deeply frustrated, and if so then i would like to apologise for insulting stardock and frogboy.

at the same time, can people understand that head butting the same bugs day in, day out, for over a year can get a little frustrating?

beta software contains bugs, i think everyone will agree with this statement. if i install beta software then i fully expect it to contain many bugs. when i install it i do so because i feel the risk of running into bugs is worth taking, and because i hope that by finding and reporting bugs i can help the developers / company involved to improve the product by fixing the bugs.

i have various horror stories myself of unsupported or never fixed software *sigh* that make my experiences with stardock seem minor in comparison. perhaps unfortunately i had come to expect more from stardock than is reasonable.

frogboy i will endeavour to be more understanding and calm

for what it is worth i would not get frustrated if the software was not worth caring about. i don't know if this helps or not, but it is true.

as a "general" comment, if you know which corners to poke it really is not that hard to break software, stardock software included. i seem to have a knack for finding and poking these corners, and then ending up with a situation that leaves me running into these corners on a daily basis. this would try the patience of a saint, and i make no claims to be a saint.
Curtains - Customize Windows with additional styles
Reply #28 from WinCustomize Forums Top
To be fair, Feline has been part of this community for a very long time and has been quite helpful if I recall in the usenet forum to others and I think to Stardock in terms of debugging. In my experience he has been a gentleman and an asset.

Perhaps the tone of the title and posts are a tad insulting. IMO, he's earned a certain latitude. Regardless, when a olong-time member of his stature (again, in my opinion anyway) of the community reaches such a state, I think a git of reflection may be called for. I don't think Feline should be dismissed as readily as the drive-troller.
Reply #29 from WinCustomize Forums Top
thank you for that

i have decided to try and adjust my expectations, so i have renewed my OB subscription so i can try out OB 2 beta.

now i have a slight problem, after 10 minutes i uninstalled OB 2 since i wanted a taskbar that i could use. when the big empty space i cannot use grew to take up 40% of the bar i called it a day *sigh*. a theme editor that would not save my edits was not massively useful either.

the problem is what to do about this. i will sleep on it, and perhaps i can think up a relaxed and calm solution that is acceptable to all parties.
Reply #30 from WinCustomize Forums Top

feline - See this is what I'm talking about.   You run into problems that others don't.  For example, you can save your edits all you want. And I've not seen any problem with empty space taking over.  I'm running a start bar theme right now (XP beige that comes with it) without a problem.

But you assume that any issue you run into is some universal problem and don't expand on it.  To solve problems we have to learn what precisely is the issue.

Here's what I have on my system screen.  You tell me what's wrong because I am not seing it.

Reply #31 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Brad - where can I get those icons?
Reply #32 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I couldn't be happier with my Stardock products because they've always served me well and provided the enjoyment I hoped for. In my opinion, ObjectDesktop is the best value customizing software available and I'm quite satisfied with my purchase.

to all at Stardock.
Reply #33 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I just want to make sure Feline's issues are resolved but I currently don't understand them.