* 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.
