Some people pride themselves on being ruthless in business. Wanting to take out the competition.  For me, I just can't live life that way. Life is short and thinking of everything as "us" versus "them" strikes me as incredibly unhealthy over the long term. Many people who just frequent WinCustomize.com looking for skins, themes, wallpapers, etc. would be surprised to learn that the world's most popular skin/theme site is the main site for downloading content for the...

Price points are one of the most challenging things in business to come up with.  At what point does something become too expensive for your target audience? It is something we wrestle with constantly. Raising the price decreases the number of buyers but not at a steady rate. The challenge is always figuring out the highest price you can sell for while maintaining the relatively biggest user base. Sometimes pricing things too low can hurt you. People assume that a product or service is o...

So if we can combine Comcast with Disney we can create some sort of super villain type scenario. Oh boy.

Stardock is a very profitable company. But I hate to say it, but we could be immensely more profitable than we are if we were just willing to do things we don't think people would like. For instance, our site, WinCustomize, is the world's most popular skin site.  But it loses money every month. It doesn't even come close to paying for itself. At the same time, it has to compete against websites whose skins install spyware. Needless to say, they make a lot more money than us. Occasiona...

If you run a business long enough eventually it'll get sued. It's inevitable. And the bigger your company is, the more often it'll get sued. I sometimes wonder what percentage of time executives at Fortune 500 companies have to spend giving depositions for some case.  Our company is fairly small and I've had to give my share of depositions in lawsuits. Each lawsuit against us I believe (even with hindsight) was unnecessary and really frivolous.  One thing I have learned from law...

According to the US Department of Labor , about 55% of Americans are employed by small businesses. That is, companies with fewer than 50 employees total. And while I don't have the statistics handy, something like 70% of Americans are employed by companies with fewer than 1000 employees. This is important when one considers who to vote for in the next election. John Kerry has stated that he will raise the taxes on those who make more than $200,000 in income yearly. He is counting on people t...

For some reason, it really pisses me off when someone argues that corporations aren't paying enough in taxes. And it really pisses me off when someone argues that there's these large tax shelters or loopholes. For a few days I couldn't figure out exactly why it ticks me off so much. I debate tons of issues on this site and none of them get me mad. Heck, sometimes I take up the opposing point of view just for a good debate. But on taxes, something about them really irritates me. I ha...

So I didn't win Michigan's Entrepreneur of the Year award this year. I was a finalist and so I'm told everyone who makes it that far is a "Winner". But the competition always brings into question, what exactly is an entrepreneur? How do you measure different levels of success? For example, is someone who inherited their business an entrpreneur? If so, how do you measure their entrepreneurship? And how do you measure entrpereneurship itself? Is it the number of jobs created? The revenued...

* What mistakes cost shareware developers the most money? Shareware authors that are too stingy in their restrictions initially or too easy in restrictions later on.  When you make a program, it needs to be usable enough that the potential customer can see what it does and how well it does it.  Some authors will cripple their program so much in fear that people won’t register it if it’s fully usable. But what happens is doing that causes the user to stop ev...

In business negotiations I work off a fairly straight forward principle: Enlightened self interest. This principle has many other terms that describe it. Win-Win, success has many fathers, to name two. I don't approach negotiations as a zero sum game.  With partners and employees, we try to do everything we can to make sure they benefit from the deal as much as possible as long as we too are benefiting at an acceptable level. Why? Because having other people rooting for your success i...

I'm pretty jazzed but I think we're getting close to where you'll be able to start posting articles via blog nav pro.  Which is much fatser than going through the web interface.

We don't discriminate against who we work with. We look for the best and brightest from all over the world. JoeUser.com's Blog Navigator is developed in Poland. Our documentation is written in UK. Some of our artwork is from Canada and other parts from Brazil.  And a lot of JoeUser.com's upcoming ASP.NET stuff will probably be done in Italy.  Is this a bad thing? I don't think so. Next month we're going to release a Gold Fish Aquarium Desktop. It's incredibly cool. The fish were de...

Here are 5 items that I would like any future President to consider if they want to actually help the United States economcially -- to create new jobs for Americans. #1 Tort reform. People hear about company A suing company B all the time. Or an individual (or group of individuals) suing some company.  I got personally sued this past year. Want to know why? Because my employer (I'm the CEO but it's a class C corporation) didn't agree to just let some company use our popular icon format w...

Demographically, the Democratic party base is largely made up of two groups: The rich and the poor. If only the middle class voted, the Democratic party would become an endangered species. Yet it's Democrats who seem most inclined to raise taxes. Why would they raise taxes if its leaders are so rich? The reason is that there are rich people and then there are rich people.  The rich portion of the Democratic base aren't people earning money in the traditional sense. They inherit it or th...

Over the past several months we've been hiring a lot of people.  So this weekend I decided to put together a little orientation power point that our HR people can eventually use to help introduce new people to the company. One of the things I wanted to put in there (and did) was our overall philosophy. "The Stardock Way" if you will. I've posted about it before but I've modified it as I've learned more on business and life in general. Here's the 10 rules we use to guide ourselves by: ...