Thoughts on DesktopX's future

No because it requires immense effort still.  Visual Studio can't turn out a Word processor in a couple of weeks.  DesktopX Pro can build some very specific types of unique content without alot of effort.

Let's use Natural Desktop as an example -- with DesktopX Enterprise, we built that in a few weeks with just a couple people.  With Visual Studio, it would have taken many many many months to do it.

For building desktops, DesktopX is very specialized at the types of content it can create just as programs like Maya are specialized to create 3D models.   There were a lot of people at Stardock who didn't want DesktopX Pro or Enteprise to exist at all (particularly Enterprise).

If Konfabulator has shown anything to be true it is that the CONTENT matters more than the technology of the thing that uses the content.   DesktopX can create, relatively easily, a very specific type of unique content that people want.  So the question is which direction is best? Turn DesktopX into a quasi-internal-only tool to create other stuff to sell that is stand-alone? Or to make it available to other developers who might compete with content Stardock might want to sell? There's no easy answer.

Let me give you a totally unrelated example: The Political Machine.  Stardock developed a Direct3D backend for DesktopX to take its .dxpacks and run them in a 3D environment.  As a result, Stardock was able to crank out the user interfaces and screens for The Political Machine in a very short amount of time.  This allowed Stardock to cut development time on the game in half.  This led to the question -- should Stardock try to encourage/sell DesktopX Enterprise to other game developers to help them (And generate additional revenue) or should DesktopX Enterprise be used as a competitive advantage for Stardock's own internal game design teams?  Like most things, the answer ended up somewhere in between -- we decided that we would tell people how we wer able to create all these game screens so fast but we wouldn't encourage people too much to use DesktopX for game making unless they came to us and negotiated licensing.

The Desktop Pet is a good example and you'll see why when it comes out.  That was created with DesktopX Pro (not Enterprise).   The Desktop Pet will probably sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies on-line and if we get it into retail another 20,000 to 30,000 units.  You couldn't create a desktop pet with say Konfabulator or any of the other "widget" programs because they're currently too limited.  But DesktopX Pro, out of the box, can do it.  One developer and one 3D modeler in a couple months.  And there's nothing out ther that is anywhere near as sophisticated.  But there's nothing stopping someone else from doing the same thing as we're doing.  All some larger company would have to do is pick up a copy of DesktopX Pro for $69.95 and create "Virtual Rover" or something and have a hit leaving our pet in the dust.  So again, there is always some conflict over how DesktopX should be marketed.  Some might say "Why does Stardock even let DesktopX be available at all to the public?" 

A good example was a product we barely publicized because the pricing was never easy to nail down.  It was called Impression Creator. It made it easy to create those auto-run menus that you see when you put your CD in the drive.  We noticed something -- most of those menus look terrible and most of them look as if the developer was trying to make them quasi-skinned.  But with Impression Creator (which is just DesktopX Pro re-branded) you could create spectacular ones in an afternoon.  But what killed it is when DesktopX's price was moved to $69.95.  At that point, it was too much of a niche market to justify putting scarce marketing resources into. 

Moreover, we've seen that the person or company creating the content gets more credit than the technology behind it.  We'd be better off providing such content creation as a service that we could then bring in skinners from the community to work with us on.  Despite all the power of DesktopX, third-parties have not really done that much with it.  This is the opposite experience we've had with WindowBlinds where skinners run the show.

So far, because people make trinkets like clocks or try to copy what's been done on Konfabulator, the issue with what DesktopX should and shouldn't do has never come to a head.  A few months back someone made an Aero web browser using DesktopX that was fully compatible with Internet Explorer (it uses its ActiveX control).  I know that raised some eye brows around here. 

Some people forget that DesktopX was developed during a different time in the skinning community.  The target market for it was skinners (same as WindowBlinds).  It was expected that the community would jump in and figure out all the neat things that can be done with it.   But that didn't happen.  And so 4 years later, Konfabulator shows up on the Mac and then eventually on Windows.  And unlike DesktopX, its developer included abunch of really cool content it made itself.  It wasn't made with skinners in mind, making a Konfabulator widget (especially when it was first released) was huge pain.  They focused purely on the consumers -- the users.  Imagine how different DesktopX's history might have been in 75% of the budget wasn't spend on the content creation elements -- the GUI for creating, manipulating, and exporting objects and desktops?  6 months alone were spent figuring out how to make ActiveX controls move seamlessly with other DekstopX objects.  Nothing else can do that.  But how many things use ActiveX controls? Hardly any.  It's incredibly powerful stuff but instead people debate which is "better" based on how pretty the little PNG files that display clocks and weather monitors and other trivialities. 

In other words, Stardock developed DesktopX under the misconception that the key to success was getting "Skinners" on board.  But that has changed in the past few years.  What we've seen both in our own experience is that consumers are driving success.  Consumers will choose what they find easiest/best to use and THEN the skinners will follow what the consumers are already doing.  It doesn't matter that Konfabulator and the rest have no real development environment for the skinner.  The skinner will sit down in some editor and peck out their XML and their JavaScript and deal with all the other hassles because that's where all the user are.

The problem is that DesktopX is still saddled with all this development environment stuff which adds a great deal of complexity and overhead to the actual environment (unless you use just the DesktopX run-time which we did in 3.0).  If there's a DesktopX 4, I think you'll find it a very very different animal.  It'll not care about the content creation, it'll use XAML what content creation help it provides will mostly be about making it easier to do simple things (widgets for instance) but fancier things would be done using Sparkle and what not.  But it's hard to say this early on.