In 2000 Stardock was presented with an opportunity. It was near the height of the dot-coms and one of those dot-coms recognized a fundamental truth about WindowBlinds: It had the ability to fully control what was presented by the Windows GUI.  So not only could WindowBlinds change the look and feel of your Windows GUI (title bars, push buttons, borders, etc.). But it could add new content. And one of these dot-coms came to us with a fairly straight forward proposition -- integrate advertisements into the Windows GUI and you could make big bucks.  We turned them down.

While lots of money is always appealing, we did not want to be the company that made it possible for advertisers to take over your desktop. But that was before spyware really took off. 

In the post-dot com collapse, advertising has lost much of its value but if companies could advertise without having to be on an actual website, they could still make money. And that's where spyware has come in.  What is spyware? Odds are you have some on your computer. In fact, odds are you have a lot of Spyware on your computer. Spyware are various programs that manage to get themselves installed on your computer, usually without you knowing it. They sit there quietly informing their patrons what you are doing on your computer. Maybe they'll just report what websites you visit. Maybe they'll send back what programs you use. Maybe they'll list what songs you listen to. Who knows. Different programs spy on different things. Some of them will hijack your web browser so that you end up going to different websites than you intend to. Or maybe they'll pop up an advertisement randomly on your screen. 

What they definitely do, besides invade your privacy, is cause all kinds of stability and performance issues on your computer. A couple of weeks ago I ended up having my system brought to its knees simply from having visited a website that used a vulnerability in Internet Explorer to install dozens of Spyware programs onto my computer. It took the better part of the day to get them off. They're as bad as viruses to remove and most anti-virus software won't remove them.

The program I've come to rely on is called Adaware. It'll scan your computer and remove much of the Spyware. If you haven't ever run one of these programs, you'll probably be shocked at a) how much of this crap has gotten onto your computer and how much it has slowed your computer down.

But that's not the worst part of it. Legitimate companies are increasingly putting Spyware in their software. The temptation is great. Stardock estimated that it could have generated between $600,000 to $800,000 last year in additional revenue by bundling Spyware with its software. It has rejected all proposals because it doesn't need to make money that way. Stardock generates its revenue by selling its software. On-line, you'll see on some tech forums people complain that Stardock is "greedy" because it charges money to buy full versions of some of its products. I would say this method is much better than the alternative. Because increasingly, "free" software and "free" services aren't really free anymore. They claim to be free but they put this stuff on your computer.

WinCustomize, for example, is paid for by the sales of software and subscriptions. But the revenue it receives is nothing compared to some of the other sites in its market that now bundle spyware with their downloads. As I make my rounds on the net, I see the trend moving forward -- more and more sites, more and more products are moving to Spyware. Why? Because its victims usually have no idea that they're even victims. The distributors of Spyware can make millions of dollars while most people are totally unaware that they are funding it.

The net result is that we are seeing a mini-resurgence of the Dot-Com era. Entire companies and industries and even business models are being funded by Spyware. Personally, I hope Microsoft updates Windows so that this junk can't get installed on your computer without your knowledge. It's a serious security issue. People shouldn't have things running on their computer that they haven't given their okay to. But one has to wonder what will happen to the industry and the products and services which have come to rely on it.

For this article I scanned one of my laptops. I have never intentionally installed any Spyware on my computer. These are programs that installed themselves after having been surfing the net. And I don't frequent porn or warez sites.