I have to repeat my post from another thread:

Evil teaser is evil.

Me wants more info about not-MoM.

Transparence to any degree beyond the company community relations and sales walls is always a good thing for consumers. Hats off those running things at SD for giving consumers and critics alike a look into their privately held company.

What do you mean by the following (page 15)?

If this means adding DRM to some Impulse content, this will greatly reduce my interest in it, as Impulse was toted as the DRM-less source of software. At least any DRM restriction should be clearly labelled in the store.

I expect it simply means that developers using reactor will have the option of using the same system as alreaady used on GalCiv2, WindowBlinds, etc.

wow, I did't do the survey, but I approve every single point of it. now is it good or bad that I am this "mainstream"?

btt: I appreciate that we as your customers get informed about your status quo and your future plans! SoaSE is my first digitally bought game and I don't regret it at all. (And your support is working on my problem with the retail box, I'm sure they'll solve that one, too)

The Impulse Reactor is planned to be a tool for other developers to get their stuff published on Impulse without much hassle, it's supposed to use a standard licensing agreement (between publisher and developer, not the EULA for us) and the hope is that it will make it fairly painless for developers to get their stuff published digitally. The caveat of course is that not all developers think alike, and so to attract the majority of them, the Impulse Reactor does need to offer protection options that the developers will be able to select for the protection scheme that they are comfortable with, but at the same time one that's not nearly as bad as SecuROM, for example.

And it is noted on a product's store page if it uses "extra" protection besides the basic Impulse verification on patching.

In essence, it's aspiring to be a good thing. It will help bring more developers to put up their stuff on Impulse while offering them essentially a Stardock designed protection scheme if they want one. And since Stardock isn't one for intrusive protection, it'll be much friendlier than the few options developers have currently, as Frogboy mentions.

Impulse is not touted as a DRM-less source of software. STARDOCK's retail games, do not.

Whether it be TotalGaming.net or Impulse, third-party games have always been and are always free to use whatever they want to use provided that they inform the customer what they are doing.  

For example, if EA were to put Spore on Impulse and they insisted on using their own copy protection scheme, we have to abide by that whether we agree with their position or not. 

So what can be done to improve that? The answer is to try to encourage publishers to move away from draconian (or "harsh DRM" as I think the EA CEO said) over to something that's effective but doesn't inconvenience customers. So we're evaluating whether to include that sort of thing in Impulse Reactor (the back end API set we provide).

That said, STARDOCK games, will continue with the same policy we've had for 5+ years now. No CD copy protection.

I am really disappointed that there's no mention of DesktopX in the PDF. I think it's one of the best softwares Stardock makes. Second only to Windowblinds, IMHO.  Some say it's too hard to learn...it's child's play compared to making a windowblind.  Just an opinion....   

Indeed. Also very interesting to me is how the survey sample was selected. 2.4 million customers seems like it should be a large (majority?) share of the total; it's (edit) nearly (edit) half the highest Member Number I've noticed around here.

Did you by any chance deliberately exclude frequent posters on the forums? I'm no stats jock, but I can imagine that regular participation here is a definite "outlier" flag for the total universe of SD customers.

(edit) I also didn't notice any info on how many of the recipients actually responded.(edit)

Not that I'm a transparency junkie or anything...

Towards the bottom of page 24

Control Center had the best virtual desktops around but there were free o;
the same held true for Object Edit and ObjectZIP.  By contrast, programs like WindowBlinds have no are .
What Stardock needs to continue to explore is how to develop software that adds functionality that 
DesktopX 4.0 is an area where we plan to explore this further.  Stay tuned.

this is a very nice thing to do for us customers, such transparency is very welcome to someone like myself

For what it is worth I was one of those people. I must be lucky since I got the survey last year and the year before as well if memory serves.

Interesting. Can't say I agree with every little thing, but it's good.

Couple of typos though.

As long as everything is transparent, it's okay for me. (Okay for me to use Impulse to buy games with acceptable protection schemes.)

Oopsie! 

I woke up with a plausible answer to my whiny "why no survey for me" question: I probably took every opportunity to set no marketing message options, and Stardock might have considered the survey to be a marketing project.

Still curious to know what the return sample size was in comparison to the total of customers logging in to the SDC or Impulse servers for the period.

Hey Brad,

Congratulations on 15 years! This is a very remarkable achievement in an industry well known for company overnight shutdowns. Best wishes to you and all the staff. If there's anything I can do, even though I’m further away, don't hesitate to ask.

GP just published an article on the revised GBR from the report info. Do you want to know more? If so, go here.

As always, information about how Stardock is doing is appreciated.

i always smile when i read the results of surveys.  Yes it went out to 2.4 million folks, how many responded?   Demographics of the responders (gamers or customizers etc.)  Surveys are nice, I usually answer those that I receive.  Surveys though really can get you into trouble.  If the businesses that sent out surveys only went soley by the responders they could find that they made a lot of bad decisions.

I wonder how the survey responses stack up against the daily info that is available through the forums, email and IRC?   I wonder if someone is looking at that.

This is basically a version of one of my favorite questions from when I was a working "social scientist." But those shudder quotes mean that I was on the losing side of the current claims in the discipline that they are "scientific," and they're there because I have steadily increasing doubts about survey methodologies and think we might well be best of ditching them all and trying to limit our arguments to more "concrete" results like election returns, product sales, and *possibly* aggregate forum posts *if* you can present some sort of plausible schema for classifying and summarizing them mathematically. Without serious math, it ain't science, IMO.

Mind you, I strongly believe that lots of academic work done in the name of "political science" and "economics" is worthwhile--it's just been done under an arrogant rubric. I don't think they deserve to claim they're sciences until they consistently base their arguments on empirically testable hypothoses, and IMO, no survey will every yield empirical results because they depend on the inherently subjective nature of language. Medicine's closer to being a real science, and that's really only because they have a bunch of rigourous biologists to rely on.