They say that if you get old enough, you forget your own birthday.
WinCustomize has officially gotten old enough to forget its own 5th birthday! LOL.
On March 13, 2001, WinCustomize was put up. The first news item read:
We're up a lot earlier than we had planned on. With Skinz.org seeming to be gone, we wanted to get something up that users can count on. We are going to try to make WinCustomize.com into a skinning protal that helps users find the other cool skinning websites like DeskMod and Deviant Art and such. But at the same time, we want a website that users can truly count on.
It's truly astounding how much has changed. Originally, the site was going to be a portal to other sites. Stardock didn't want to get into (or pay for) a full-blown skinning site. So the site was given two missions:
#1 To be a site skinners could count on to be up for the long haul. And #2 To support a community of skin sites to help get them going.
As time has shown, these are somewhat conflicting goals. Nowadays, because the community has become so stable, it's hard to remember a time when skin sites would go up and down. A skinner would upload their work to a given site, thinking it would be safe, only to lose it all when it went down or because it had a hard drive crash or whatever. Many truly great skins from the dawn of the skinning "age" were lost as a result. So this site was created so that people would have a place they could rely on. And here we are, 5 years later where none of us, including myself, even remembered that March 13th was a historical birthday for the website.
Over the years there's been a consolidation on the # of active skin sites but also a consistency as well. While not as many new sites have been created in the past year or two, there haven't been too many closings either.
This year we have a lot of things planned for the site. Thanks to the success of Galactic Civilizations II Stardock now has a budget to upgrade its overall network infrastructure which will pay real dividends for WinCustomize.com. New features, more servers, more developers. Subscribers will continue to see their perks increased over time as we'll be able to have more dedicated "stuff" for them both in terms of servers and content.
We're also looking to bring someone on whose job will be to oversee WinCustomize.com and Stardock's other websites. Sometimes things here may seem inconsistent in the amount of front page attention WinCustomize gets because well, as much as I love all you guys, WinCustomize is only part of what I do. So when things get busy, I end up not doing things like...well updating the poll or putting new news items up and that kind of thing (and other people for some reason don't submit news items often). So we'll be bringing someone on there. We also hope to finally be able to bring Jafo on full time. Consider this, Jafo, who many of you know, is a volunteer. He volunteers his time and energy freely to the community. He gets nothing in return on than the gratitude and appreciation of us and the community.
Year 5 is looking pretty exciting. Think about this -- by the time WinCustomize hits its 6th birthday, next March, Windows Vista will be out. And like an iceberg, you only see what's on the surface right now. A significant portion (probaby about half) of Stardock's development focus is currently working on stuff for Windows Vista. Some things subtle. Some things won't be out right away. But great things are afoot. The skinning age will dramatically change because the desktop will be a 3D surface (it's still 2D as a UI of course) with all the possibilities that implies. It will open the door to more types of skinning than ever before.
So hold on to your hats, because you ain't seen nothin' yet! 
