So what's next for WinCustomize?

For the first time in many years, Stardock has invested in a massive upgrade to its server hardware.   It's, by far, the most expensive and expansive hardware upgrade we've done.

Part of it was necessitated by last year's near destruction of not just this site but all of Stardock's tech infrastructure.

About a year ago, we had an issue in our datacenter that caused many of our critical VMs to become corrupted and required us to reconstruct nearly everything from scratch. 

Now, we had backups but it was one of those things that hadn't been fully tested because you are talking something like 36 terrabytes of data.  

It took us awhile to recover and we didn't fully recover.  There was loss and the recovery wiped out our IT budget for the year.

Now, we are in 2026 and we are looking at where things are going with WinCustomize.  The first thing we're doing is migrating it all to the new hardware. This will happen in bits and pieces but you should notice a general speedup.

But the real change is going to be the complete rewrite of this site.  It's going to look different and we are going to be changing the site's mission a bit.  It's still about customization but the world is getting very interesting with people able to create a lot of interesting stuff.

I've already built a kind of test site for this.  You can see it here. https://www.clairvoyanceai.com/gallery/browse?type=exhibit 

That's just for showing off cool stuff people have made. It's not terribly applicable here since WInCustomize has always been about sharing things that others can use to customize their Windows experience in some neat way.

But I do think we can look forward to people being able to make DesktopX type things a lot easier and share them.  We just need to make a new product for it (a new DesktopX basically but one that is built with today's security -- we were so native 20 years ago).  

I'd like to get your opinions on what kinds of new things you'd like to see added here.  We are pretty far away from the days of people making Winamp skins and icon packages. People don't do that anymore.    I had thought, at one time, that maybe iPhone/Android stuff might be interesting but I never even change the wallpaper on my iPhone.

But I can imagine all kinds of interesting things that I might want to improve my desktop in 2026 provided it can be done without fear of malware or something getting injected.