A victim of ones own success

Stardock's business model has been predicated adapting to what users request.  The company's motto is "Innovation on demand".

The idea being that we release the best product we can and then we rapidly enhance it based on user feedback.  Users of Object Desktop, for instance, are very familiar with this.  We have also introduced this model to our game development which has had very positive results.  Our conclusion isn't so much that Stardock is "great" at customer service but rather most PC game companies are simply not geared up to do the kind of development model we're used to.

The PC utility market is extremely competitive and so rapid updates are one of our critical advantagers.  Since 1999, a huge percentage of Stardock's R&D budget has been put into building an infrastructure to crank out user requested updates quickly.

Central to that strategy has been Stardock Central which allows, literally, a developer to put up a build onto the system and have it available to users without creating an installer.  In addition, a custom set of forums that interact with the user's account information was created over the past few years that lets them interact with all our sites, Stardock Central, and access things quickly and easily depending on which site they're on.  It also has allowed us to implement various "community" features that helps make users part of the team -- because they are.

Where the model is starting to break down is as we've become more mainstream, the sheer numbers of users has started to show weaknesses in our system.  In addition, the demographic has dramatically changed which has significantly hampered our ability to do what we're best known for doing -- crank out rapid updates.

In the past, especially with Object Desktop, our demographic was almost completely all power users.  As a result, we could release alpha-level updates to those users who, in turn, would let us know what changes they wanted or any bugs they found. Power users who weren't comfortable with alphas would wait for betas and power users not comfortable with either would wait for releases.  Bugs, features, etc. would be queued up to be addressed and the system flowed nicely.

Over the past year or so, the utility market we're in, the desktop enhancement market has had two odd things happen: First, the market has increased in size dramatically. Secondly, the number of other providers of such software has strangely declined (despite more opportunity).  What happened to all these developers is subject for a different topic. But the net result is that WinCustomize.com, Stardock's site for supporting Windows customization, exploded with far more users than had been expected. Even now, it's basically limited by server levels.

The market size increasing though has brought in users who are not power users. Users who don't read manuals, don't understand the difference between alpha, beta, RC, release. Don't know how to resolve problems on their own.  The net result has been that the same updates that we used to just throw out onto Object Desktop (or ThinkDesk) now have to go through an internal QA or else we'll suffer in massive support calls (phone, email, more phone, more email) that drowns out truly serious support (In the last week of February, a sampling of tech support email resulted in the conclusion that roughly 2 out of 3 emails would have been resolved had the user simply looked at the readme in the given product or gone to the knowledge base -- two years ago, that would have been 1 out of 10 emails).

Of course, we're not set up with that kind of internal QA, not in terms of a long-term infrastructure.  When we do a major release like WindowBlinds 5 or Galactic Civilizations II we can put together a pretty impressive QA team using people from other parts of the company. But those people are far too expensive to have doing QA for the long term.  So now we're in the position of having to build a full time QA staff that can rapidly handle the updates that come from the various development teams and get them out there.

Similarly, we're going to have to start hiring people to do forum support. More people I should say.  In our rapid development model, we would put up an update that would list what's in there and users would respond with what they found worked/didn't work.  Now, we put up updates and people will ask "Did you fix <bug X>?" or "When is <Feature Y> going to be put in?"  That is, assuming the user even reads through the change log at all before asking questions.  Then there's the users who read the change log but don't try the update and complain about theoretical things.  "Oh, I don't like that new WindowFX feature, I think it might slow down my computer." or "I think the economic change in GalCiv II is bad" (without having tried it).

Of course, right now, we simply don't have those people to beef up a permanent large scale QA department or to act as a day to day buffer between development and support. They have to be hired and trained which we are, but it's a slow process.

So the business model of developing niche software (desktop enhancement utilities and turn based strategy games) in order to attract power users and hard core games has started to break down.  They have started to break down because those markets are no longer niche markets. Turn based strategy games have become mainstream and desktop enhancements are mainstream. And so we will have to evolve.  But it's been painful and likely to continue to be painful for awhile.