While Stardock makes the best software in the category of skinning, I often ask myself if they have people inventing new goodies.
Yes, windowblinds is the greatest thing in skinning and make XP looks great with Glass style and all as if it were Vista. Why no one ever came up with that kind of idea first since Windowblinds and SkinStudio do it so well? Now Microsoft comes with the animated wallpaper (I’ve seen animated wallpapers way before though) but Stardock simply make it better. It seems stardock does not invent much, but uses ideas and make them better.
Who says Microsoft invented animated wallpaper? DeskScapes development precedes animated wallpaper from Microsoft. We simply chose to combine our strengths and work together for mutual benefit.
And dynamic animated wallpaper is quite an achievement. Load up the cube one and check your CPU use. Tell me if anyone else could do that. Those people floating around on the net ttrying to get you to play a screen saver as your wallpaper or some WinXP user saying how you could hack animated wallpapers should try to do it while using less than 5% CPU use the way DeskScapes does it.
We have a number of internal projects but they take time to come out.
Many of the things we "invent" we rarely get credit for. We "invent" the concept of widgets and companies like Konfabulator/yahoo Widgets get the credit.
We were the ones who first introduced ZIP files as folders. Does anyone remember that? Probably not.
And now we have DeskScapes which is a pretty significant innovation. Even little things like the .dream format will likely be forgotten in time. Does anyone seriously think animated wallpapers would be taking off like they are if users were forced to scrounge around for .WMV files or .MPEG files? Talk about a search term of doom. And consider all the development effort necessary to support .DREAM - the tools, the website, the video previews, large scale upload handilng, etc. These are things that quickly get taken for granted -- we want them to because it should be invisible.
But never confuse seamlessness for resting on ones laurals.
I will say truthfully that we have changed in that we won't develop something new that we can't adequately market. I can tell you it stings our development team considerably every time we read about how "Konfabulator" "invented" desktop widgets or that Apple/Microsoft were copying them while we get no coverage.
Check out this desktop from the year 2000. That's Windows 2000. SEVEN years ago. Wow, a alpha blended, glass "sidebar" of "widgets" on the right. Good thing this was invented 3+ years later by other people or that Apple "invtented" it with Dashboard. And that's a theme from this site by a user (there's hundreds of this kind of thing).
Rant aside, the point is that we are as inventive as ever, we simply are more careful to keep things under wraps until they have matured further. We kept DeskScapes under wraps even as it was running on our Longhorn betas nearly a year ago. If you saw what we had in development, your eyes would pop out. 
