Konfabulator Kicking DesktopX's widget butt

Don't let it be said that I don't tell the truth when it comes to looking at the customization market.  In the battle of widgets, Konfabulator is kicking DesktopX's butt.

But as a Konfabulator fan, I can live with that.  It's a superb program with a really top notch team.  It deserves success a lot more than say some company that cranks out a $20 program that patches a byte of memory on a bundled Windows system file.

Though in the larger scheme of things, widgets have not panned out as being quite as big of a deal (at this point) as we had hoped. No customization app, of any kind, has gotten Konfabulator's attention in the mainstream media. But the download counts just aren't there. Konfabulator widgets get typically 2k downloads. And mind you, this is wiping the floor with everyone else. I.e. 10X what DesktopX widgets are getting which in turn gets more than the others we can measure.  By contrast, a decent WindowBlinds skin can expect 20k users to download it.

So putting aside the problem with widgets in general, let's go back to why DesktopX is losing the battle of widgets.

#1 Stardock has failed at marketing DesktopX effectively.  I mean at a very basic level - getting the program into the hands of columnists, editors, etc.  Robert X. Cringely, who wrote about Konfabulator, had never heard of DesktopX and he's about as much of an industrial insider as you can get (he made "Triumph of the Nerds" and wrote "Accidental Empires"). 

So before people arm-chair quarterback DesktopX product management, the fact is, unless people who write about software get the program to use in the first place, they won't have the opportunity to complain about any documentation faults or that the widgets aren't sexy enough or that the website is too confusing or that the UI is confusing or whatever. 

#2 DesktopX's biggest strength is its biggest marketing disadvantage. To USE Konfabulator you just load it up and start loading widgets and they work great. Very simple.  Want to create a widget? Well... very different thing. You do it outside the program using text editors and put things together by pixel. 

By contrast, in DesktopX, the content creation portion is part of the program. It's easy to create and modify stuff.

So how is this a disadvantage? First: It makes DesktopX seem more complicated than it is.  Second: It means even the most casual, unskilled skinner can crank out yet another weather widget and upload it.

#3 DesktopX's breadth works against it.  DesktopX isn't mostly used for widgets. It's used for DESKTOPS.  In the past month, only ONE DesktopX related item showed up in the top 50. It was MediaCenter desktop. 

In fact, the most popular DesktopX object got more downloads than the top DesktopX widget. And unfortunatley that brings up our next problem.

#4 Objects and widgets confuse people. At some point we may have to put more guidlines on uploading.  DesktopX objects are supposed to be basically glorified icons and such. If there's functionality involved, they should be widgets.  But the whole thing is vague and confusing thus splitting the commuinty up further. There's no easy solution to this because having objects is the only thing that keeps the widget library, already filled with a gazillion weather widgets, from also having a gazillion little animated icon type things.

#5 DesktopX does not include a full fledged suite of consistent looking widgets.  There is the core set. But despite the great work Paul (Mormegil) did on these, I don't think they're as good as the Konfabulator defaults and there aren't as many.  There needs to be some more "themes" of DesktopX widgets.

#6 DesktopX lacks a motivated development community. The docs for DesktopX are good. I'm sorry but anyone complaining about DesktopX development docs isn't someone I'm going to take very seriously.  I've had years of experience looking at this stuff and DX's docs are quite good.  Any strong skinning community needs at least 12 active content creators.  DesktopX has perhaps 5.  Konfabulator has around 16 regular authors.  Stardock needs to find a way to get more peple to make interesting stuff for DesktopX. 

Given that it is much much easier to create widgets for DesktopX, one has to ask, why was the UPS widget done for Konfab first when it would have been much easier to do under DesktopX?  The DX community just isn't organized or motivated.

These 6 things are the main problems I see with DesktopX.

Stardock, at some point, is going ot have to decide whether it should focus on trying to sell DesktopX or sell DesktopX generated content.  Aquarium Desktop and Natural Desktop are both made with DesktopX. They've made tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. 

So if Stardock continues to fail to encourage the community to create DesktopX content, then the other possibility would be to sell premium content developed by Stardock or Stardock partners.  After all, are people really buying Konfab or DesktopX because of the idea of widgets or because they want to put cool looking mini programs on their desktop?   If it's the latter, why not just sell users the actual widgets in stand alone form and start looking at DesktopX itself as more of a SkinStudio type platform for developers?

So over the coming months, Stardock is going to have to decide how it can address the 6 issues i mentioned above (for starters) or it's going to have to change the rules and go a different direction (i.e. have a DesktopX run-time that's purely for users and a DesktopX Builder for those who want to create stuff).