
Company Information
Stardock was founded by
20 year old college student Brad Wardell to help pay for school.
Incorporated in 1993, Stardock focused on developing software for
IBM’s OS/2 operating system. Wardell wrote the OS/2 game Galactic
Civilizations between taking electrical engineering classes and
teaching digital logic lab, and helping run the university Macintosh
lab.
Galactic Civilizations
was released in Fall 1994. The game was a critical success and
convinced Wardell upon graduating from college to make Stardock his
career. By 1996, Stardock has
grown to being a multi-million dollar corporation. By teaming up with
fellow OS/2 developers such as Kurt Westerfeld (lead developer of
Object Desktop for OS/2) it had become the leading software developer
for IBM's OS/2. Its influence on OS/2 was so great that IBM asked
Stardock to be closely involved with OS/2 Warp 4 (the default OS/2
Warp 4 desktop layout was designed by Stardock along with elements of
its GUI).
In 1997, Stardock began
to transition its software development to Windows. The "OS
Wars" between Windows and OS/2 were drawing to a close with the
world largely standardizing on Windows for the desktop. Because
Stardock has historically not been venture capital funded, the company
had to find ways to fund its new Windows software products. It found
two ways to do so.
The first way was
creating software as a subscription in the form of ObjectDestop.NET.
Users would be able to purchase the new Object Desktop for Windows as
a subscription. Since it would take nearly a year for the basic parts
to be completed, users would in effect have to pay for features that
wouldn’t be delivered for many months. Stardock's loyal customer
base saved the day as thousands of them immediately subscribed to the
fledgling service.
Secondly, Wardell and
his game development team wrote the game Entrepreneur. Part strategy
game, part satire, the game was loosely based on what they had just witnessed
- start a company and try to monopolize a market by ruthlessly
destroying your competitors. The game was a hit and combined with
Stardock’s Object Desktop subscriptions allowed the company to
release the core set Object Desktop features by the end of 1999.
Object Desktop on
Windows became far more successful than anything Stardock had ever
previously done and by the end of 2001 Stardock had surpassed the
sales they’d ever seen in the OS/2 market. Fortune 500 companies
down to individual developers licensed Stardock's technology to create
custom environments for their employees and customers. Millions of
individual consumers and corporate desktops would use parts of Object
Desktop (such as WindowBlinds) to customize Windows to suit their
needs.
As Windows became more
dominate, the desire for the ability to customize and personalize it
to match specific usages of it grew. Stardock's software has helped
fill this growing niche and helped create awareness of the usability
benefits of customized desktop environments.
In early 2001, the
collapse of the dot-com’s created a vacuum in desktop theme
distribution sites (known as “skin sites”). Stardock
proposed the creation of a website called WinCustomize.com that would
be easy to use, have community features (message boards, reviews,
commenting on news items, etc.), and most importantly, be a reliable
place for artists, users, and developers to visit. Within a year,
WinCustomize.com had become one of the most popular sites on the
Internet with over a million monthly visitors and becoming an
increasing source of revenue for Stardock through the sales of
subscriptions and other merchandize.
Today, Stardock is
spread across the globe. It looks for the best and brightest from
around the world. This team works together via the Internet. While the
core of Stardock is located in an office complex in Livonia Michigan,
nearly half the staff is located remotely. This team continues forward
on creating PC software that allows both corporations and consumers to
customize their Windows PCs. It occasionally still releases a new PC
game now and then.
Stardock's subscription
networks continue to be the primary source of revenue for Stardock and
it has plans to expand its services into information environments and
web services over the coming years.
Stardock
Livonia MI 48152
Phone: (734) 762-0687
Fax: (734) 762-0690
Email:info@stardock.com
Orders: 734-762-0687
Orders: 734-762-0687
Incorporated 1993
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