And I do want to apologize about our horrible communication on this project. There's no excuse for it.
The best I can do is provide an explaination:
We're currently stretched far thinner than we have in the past. It would require practically a book to go into the whole detail. It's a classic case of when a company moves from being a few people to being a bigger company and things not getting done as they should get done.
THis past year has been one of transition and we'r ein the process of hiring and adjusting to the changes we've seen.
On top of that, it's amazing how much difference one or two people can make. When those people aren't as available as they were, the results can be devastating.
Let me give you an example - I've been trying to bring someone on whose only j ob is to hang out and provide forum support. But we seem to go through these guys like water for various reasons.
Half the problem is Stardock's failure to delivery ObjectBar in a timely manner.
But the other half, and worse problem, has been our failure to communicate with you guys -- our customers. The ones who pay our bills. And it's the latter part that is truly upsetting to me, as someone who knows the importance of customer loyalty.
Overall, the problem at Stardock for the past 6 months could be summed up thusly: Scaleability. Processes that work fine in a company of 10 to 15 people start to fall apart when you have 40 people.
Let me give you a specific example of this:
Tech support. For years -- 1995 to 2005 -- we used PM Mail for tech support. NOthing fancy. It worked fine. But it simply didn't scale to when you move from having a base of say 10,000 technically savvy users to say 500,000 users, most of whom aren't that technically savvy. So we've had to undergo a lot of internal changes to build a better system.
What you're seeing in other areas is the same kind of thing. Our method of doing quality assurance simply has fallen apart as the # of things that they're responsible for has grown and the complexity of it has grown.
Take for instance how much more involved WindowBlinds or DesktopX or heck even ObjectBar has become since the 1.0 release. Throw in more products and voila, you have a complete mess up like what you've seen in our handling of ObjectBar 2.
We get updates in, they go through QA - partially - go back to the developer but then don't make it onto ODNT even though we've gotten builds.
ThinkDesk has seen even bigger problems in this regard since it's a whole new set of products.
What we're doing this year is we're reorganizing so that we can do a better job on this. I realize that's not going to help fix what's happened but hopefully you'll be able to see benefits as it starts to go forward.
That's probably more info than you wanted to hear. And it doesn't solve the problem.
We DO have a new build of ObjectBar 2 though. And so we'll be working to get that up. But it's still not ready for a full 2.0. But it's close.
Stardock Forums
WinCustomize Forums
- I was just beginning to think that my $$$ on OD, CX and extra icons were lost or at least given bad out
Now that you've replied on OB2.0, I'll have to start a "What's going on with RightClick?" and "What's going on with Stardock Virtual Desktops?" thread!! 
