Any news about fixes - any news about anything - pleeeeeeease!

[Lasher Oh]

Since the last set of fixes - which really fixed my inventory by doubling each item in it, I've been hanging off  adding new products waiting for the 'borked all clear' sirene to sound.

Halloween and Christmas is coming and considering the current marketplace status, with reports about new listings not showing  up and changes to existing listings causing problems. I'm getting a little concerned.

I haven't seen any posts from the commerce team about fixes but I've been out of the loop for a few days.

I'd try looking in the jira for clues but that place is the SL equivilent of Azkaban prison and saps my  will to live.

Is there any news I have missed or are we still hanging out in rumor land.

Is it safe for me to get back in the water yet?

^L^

 (edited a typo or two)

[Kylie Jaxxon]

Haha, I like your sense of humor in your writing

Thanks for the morning chuckle...

[Smokey Newman]

I haven't seen any news but have added new items and revised some and had no problems with them.

[Couldbe Yue]

it's safe to list - whether the item will be found by anyone looking or you'll ever sell it and get paid for it is another matter all together.

Go on, list and be damned!  show them that you're not afraid of them, you have nothing to fear except fear itself.

I've run out of platitudes now and also suspect that this new low for the marketplace is going to be as good as it gets.

[Josh Susanto]

No news IS the news.

It's BAD news.

[Lasher Oh]

@ Josh  & Couldbe - Thx for the evening giggle :-)

*takes deep breath holds nose and plunges into the murky waters*

^L^

[Brooke Linden]

We are planning to deploy some fixes tomorrow--we're testing now. This will include a fix for duplicate listings (WEB-4125).

We are also working to get some transactions reporting fixes ready to go for next week. We'll provide more details on those as we get closer to being ready to deploy.

Brooke

[Josh Susanto]

.... so cash out now, right?

[Darrius Gothly]

When did you start stealing borrowing material from Second Lie? (ducks and runs for cover)

[Josh Susanto]

Actually, it's sort of the opposite.

I tell them how I think they're going to screw up next and then they do it.

Maybe I should start publishing everything as fiction and then just sue them for infringement when they do what I describe.

Maybe I'll try to sell a movie script about a VR company that uses its merchants to test mind control techniques in which persistent, escalating systematic abuses are met with only greater obedience and blind loyalty.

THEN do you think they would take me to court for stealing their idea?

[Nalates Urriah]

 Brook, other teams in SL are not having the PR problems you are. You post and get flamed. I suspect that is because of the frustration building among merchants. Even the Adult Content team, which I have slammed in my blog is getting cleaned up. Nor do other teams make the huge gaffs we attribute to your development team.

I'll suggest the big difference comes in your public relations. After all, when you consider what other teams are doing and what your team is doing and then consider whether they are smarter, have easier or harder problems, are better programmers... in a frank appraisal I can't see your team or you being any less technically competent than your co-workers. So, that leaves only some intangibles.

If you’re afraid of confrontation or find it to distasteful to deal with, I will say you’re in the wrong job. Whatever we are afraid of seems to grow or stackers give us more of it. Deal with it head on and you can get through it. Charlar and Oskar handle problem people well in meetings. We can't make you deal with these issues. But, my sense is we are verging on rebellion.

When it comes to search I think your team has a philosophical mismatch with the business world side of SL. It serves neither merchants nor residents. So, I think that your goals are creating problems and complicating design issues. I tend to agree with Darrius. I understand the Lab may have goals that do not fit mine or Darrius'. The problem again seems to devolve to confrontation. Since no one knows where or why or what you are doing... frustration builds and you get consistently yelled at.

Large numbers of people hate change and especially change that comes as a surprise. You are in the business of making change. You have to deal with it. There are those of us that appreciate change or at least understand the necessity for it. You can minimize the problems by communication and probably gain some support from that would understand what is happening.

I suspect your job has timelines and pressure and disclosure limitations. Whether you are hiding or not it comes across that way. Whether the timelines are so tight you feel you can't take time to communicate with us or not we can't know. But, the lack of communication from your group, as far as I can tell, is creating lots of hard feelings, not good PR for the company.

Your team could make some reality and perceptions checks and decide why you’re having so many issues with the community. Yeah, some of us think search sucks. I'm one of them. Some of us think changes to the Market Place suck. I’m mixed on that. But, you can’t possibly be trying to make a worse system. I would hope the lesson of Viewer 2 is not lost on you. I seriously doubt you can make a working system in the time you have without the communities help. So, something has to shift. You can’t change us. You can only change what you are doing and how you communicate.

Please do something.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Extremely well said.

Regardless of the poor development or Q/A testing that Brooke's team is or is working with, to me the #1 factor fueling the visible and quickly growing level of frustration & down right anger among the Merchant community is Brooke's established strategy to ration all communication with her customerbase to utilitarian levels. 

When she first made her presence in January, she seemed to show signs of wanting to take a more interactive yet unemotional business-level approach to communicating.  A great approach to stay calm and unbiased and interact even with those that might be your most vocal critic. 

The problem was that the first major deliverable that was forced upon her by some out-of-touch Sr. LL management to deploy into MP was the poorly planned maturity filters.  As we all know, the maturity filters (which were the MP execution of the disaserous Teenification of the Grid of 2010) were already a sore spot for most Merchants.  Then her team's deployment of the filter were poorly coded and QA'ed (as is the case with most LL deployments - look at our DD now) and caused major disruptions and confusion and lost sales to large segments of the community. 

This is not a good way for any Sr. Product Manager to start her career with her customer base.   "Hi I'm Brooke and over the next few weeks I will start by making an even bigger mess of the new and infinished deploy of MP.  I hope you all still trust and like me when I am finished."

For a more seasoned Sr. Product Manager, this would have been a bad strategy but even if it was force, he/she would have kept in mind that the #1 success factor to maintain trust with a customer is open transparent and unbiased communication with the customer.  In fact, even more communications - specially with the critics - would have been a major strategy component.

What was Brooke's strategy?  Well shortly have getting through the angry responses of the maturity filters, you could visibly notice her new strategy was:

 

1. Reduce open communication with the community on forums to minimum updates
2. Abandon any initial attempts to bridge all past attempts of establishing a healthy constructive method of communications with Merchants.
3. Filter out any acknoledgement and shut down all communications with her most vocal critics.  (me being one of them - I can tell you how blatent her snubbing of the nose is to me as I get fellow Merchants to get her to respond to my questions)
4. Shut down any communication of strategy, direction, updates of even the most critical activities her team is working on.  (ex. NDA secret Beta Test Team for DD)

 

The climax the level of degraded communications that Brooke has painted her team into was witness 1.5 weeks ago when a set of changes to the MP with fundamental shifts to MP's operation and very visible impacts to her customer base was handled by Brooke simply informing the community very vaguely with a post saying there will be an update tomorrow at 8am - 9am and we will tell you about the change AFTER its installed.

Even if this change was properly coded and properly QAed by LL and the secret Beta team, the magnitude of these changes would have still upset the Merchant community for failing to adequately prepare us, but compound this with LL's strong history of poor development and near-zero QA, and Brooke's credibility has essentially been destroyed.

Most of the Merchant community - even some of LL's strongest smart advocates - have lost most or all respect and trust for the LL Commerce Team.  Brooke's handling of the DD deployment and subsequent continued minimalistic communications is fueling the level of mistrust the community has in LL, the Commerce Team, Brooke, and I will even say Rodvik who is fully aware of the fiasco and refuses to act like a BIG BOY in the BIG BOY chair and deal with the fires in this this product team / community.

Rodvik & Brooke, you both get huge failing grades on your handling of this DD deployment.

Its time Rodvik for you to finally step up and fix the lost trust in this community by a LL Team that simply is simply not qualified to operate the Commerce Team or communicate with its Merchant community.

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

Thanks for inspiring me Natates....

I really did want to write a blog post about how the LL Commerce Team headed up by Brooke has lost effectively destroyed all confidence among the merchant community on their ability to run the commerce group and deploy the up-coming DD.

There are so many reasons why Brooke and team have lost the community's trust but you helped me focus the main issue that LL, Rodvik, Brooke have failed upon.

Too much to post here so I blogged it.  And yes... Rodvik likely read it

http://bit.ly/nnsFcv

[Pamela Galli]

I think from the ill fated moment someone got the bright idea to use Ruby on Rails (I think it is) and try to hammer it to fit with the needs of SL, it has been an unmanageable disaster. Each successive team was handed this mess and told to make it work.

I don't mistrust the current team, and I think they have been vastly more communicative compared to the previous total information/public announcement black hole. I think they are hamstrung by directives from above and the tangled software mess they inherited. Or something. That's my guess.

And I don't know what the solution is, other than to avoid breaking anything further. Now that we all have invested so much time updating listings, it's too late to just scrap it. They have to keep plunging forward somehow, with no end in sight.

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Pamela Galli wrote:

I think from the ill fated moment someone got the bright idea to use Ruby on Rails (I think it is) and try to hammer it to fit with the needs of SL, it has been an unmanageable disaster. Each successive team was handed this mess and told to make it work.

I don't mistrust the current team, and I think they have been vastly more communicative compared to the previous total information/public announcement black hole. I think they are hamstrung by directives from above and the tangled software mess they inherited. Or something. That's my guess.

And I don't know what the solution is, other than to avoid breaking anything further. Now that we all have invested so much time updating listings, it's too late to just scrap it. They have to keep plunging forward somehow, with no end in sight.

---

Remeber that Ruby On Rails is a generic development platform.  It is not a specific ecommerce package that someone like LL would have bought and simply customized to make it work for MP.  I am not an application developer with intimate knowledge of the pros and cons of Ruby on Rails vs other development platforms, but I am pretty confident in believing that th RonR was by far not the main factor to all our LL Commerce woes.

How LL deployed and used RonR as well as their lack of application system development skills and immature processes are the bigger culprit.

But, still putting aside that it is pretty much agreed LL as horribly poor system development / deployment maturity...

I have to completely disagree with you that communication was / is not a major issue.

I will challenge you Pamela to give some clear countering examples that shows that during this entire DD deployment (starting back as early as April), how Brooke has demonstrated superior or even fair levels of open transparent interactive communications with the Merchant community.  And before you use the examples of her posts over the past 2 weeks while her and her team have been on major fire-fighting mode / face saving mode, you cant include them.

Prior to the change on Sep 13th, tell us examples how she and her team have kept the merchant community in the loop of her teams activities on DD or even anything else?

You also cannot include the private discussions that Brooke might have had with you or other FRIENDS OF LL.  I know for a fact that Brooke does have private IM chats with her favored merchants.  I was even told by two merchants that she has privately apologized to them for the mess up this past week.  But private IMs and meetings do not count as healthy communications either.

So I await for you to explain how Brooke has had ANY hint of good communications when even when we begged her over the summer to provide more details... all we heard from her was crickets.

COMMUNICATIONS IS THE #1 WEAKNESS that destroyed the community's trust in Brooke and the Commerce Team.

 

[Josh Susanto]

Even before all my conspiracy talk, I had made it VERY clear to Brooke in private communication that nothing technical would be a greater danger to her than the communication style she had already begun to establish.

If she is ultimately removed from her position, I very strongly urge that the explanation to other Lindens (as to why) should not focus on technical matters, but on the communication problem. 

OTOH, I don't know entirely what pressures are on Brooke from various angles inside the company.

I have called her a liar and I stand by that.

But if the more rudimentary problem lies with someone else, I don't need Brooke's head on a plate just to have something to show for all of our troubles. 

At practically any other company, someone would have had to clean out their desk by now. And if I or anyone I have worked for were in charge at LL, this would already have happened there, too.

Please, let's encourage the correct person to be identified, and the correct example be made, even if it may take a little bit longer. 

[Pamela Galli]

I am not saying communications don't need improvement because they do, but Brooke has been responding to every report of botched things here with lists of JIRAs and things they are working on. Yes they should have not been botched but then sometimes I can do a pretty spectaluar job of botching things myself at times.

[Josh Susanto]

I can't say she hasn't at times tried.

But something, either within her or within LL, has prevented the communications to be effective in preparing merchants to make decisions about how to adapt to changes.

There's an expression in Spanish about "erasing with the elbow what is written with the hand". Telling us almost  the exact opposite of what was going to happen with DD code was a pretty big elbow, and still is, in terms of what the hand had accomplished through responding to JIRAs and such. 

[WADE1 Jya]

Thank you again for providing needed info. While the team is in there Brooke, could you ask 'em for me, if is it possible we could get item names listed on our transaction pages on SL site?

Seeing only "Order #1281062839" and having to then go cross reference this with info from the marketplace site - it is unnecessary complex dance of many steps... reminds me of government make-work programs -- where more work is created as if just to celebrate inefficiency. The order info needs to be more simply collated.

Many thanks, WADE1

[WADE1 Jya]

Oh one last thing Brooke..... any timeline for us to get charting data or infographics?

I wanna see a nicely designed page looking something like this (except with the data related to my sales & stuff):

Xstreet had one chart, and OnRez had dozens of them. For Marketplace to be counted as a definitive advance over these old systems we should have some number of charts (well, some number larger than zero that is!) :smileyvery-happy:

[Sassy Romano]

---

Nalates Urriah wrote:

 Brook, other teams in SL are not having the PR problems you are. You post and get flamed. I suspect that is because of the frustration building among merchants. Even the Adult Content team, which I have slammed in my blog is getting cleaned up. Nor do other teams make the huge gaffs we attribute to your development team.

Charlar and Oskar handle problem people well in meetings. We can't make you deal with these issues. But, my sense is we are verging on rebellion.

---

Oh i'm not so sure of that, the server team have done exceptionally well at demonstrating poor QA and utter lack of change control processes over the past couple of weeks.  First introducing a content breaking bug and flat out refusing to roll back or even expedite a fix but rather stringing it out over at least 2 weeks minimun while we daily deal with customers with broken products.  Products broken by LL.  Next was the broken physics from scripts last week.

As a PR exercise, telling us why we have to live with this for weeks.

Oskars resonse to angry posts?  He sent me a private message telling me not to do that in HIS forum.

My response was to remind him that as a paying customer, that it was HIS code (team) that caused issues for the region that I pay for. 

However, that said, they do at least tell you what they're planning on deploying, just not what they're planning on breaking and the communication in the forums is more active so in general i'd agree with you.

The whole "Customer" concept is one that is not understood from LL's point of view.  While LL might wish for a couple of government, corporate or education contracts to provide a virtual world platform, we all know what happend to the idea from M Linden on following that strategy and in the current financial climate, you can be pretty sure that those contracts would have not been renewed, thus exposing LL to likely financial crisis.

LL might find the "little people" to be a bother to deal with but most merchants know that lots micropayments add up.

So my dear LL, feel free to pursue the top tier contracts while tramping over others and when those contracts are landed, that's great for you but woe betide the day they're not renewed en masse.

 

[Arwen Serpente]

Wade, there's a JIRA that was opened after the Sept 13 deploy for this. Apparently, the item number or name is either no longer possible, or, deemed unnecessary. The order numbers and buyer name were reinstated, but not the item number. I believe there were a few others who reported that they want/need the item number as well. Since the JIRA was closed, you may want to go there and comment/vote/watch and reopen it.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4123

[Toysoldier Thor]

Sassy's comments on LL's complete lost grasp on Customer Service are spot.  This is one of LL's longest standing and most well known weaknesses among the several Growth Limiting weaknesses of LL. 

Over the short corporate life of LL, sadly LL entrenched a lot of the immature cultures and bad habbits that they learned when they were an early Startup.  In the early stages of most startups - specially in tech startups that seem to skyrocket to success because of a surprising adoption of the solution they bring to market - critical success factors like understanding and caring about the Customer are commonly a backburner priority if one at all.  They are so wrapped up in growing and improving upon the mechanics of the solution they brought to market that Customer Service is often forgetten.

The problem with LL (and many other young startups that eventually fall to the anals of corporate history books) is that in the subsequent years of their corporate evolution, even though they have tried on a few occassions to internally organise to shift LL out of the startup culture and into the more mature and controlled next stage of their evolution, the startup culture has not been able to be shut down.

The #1 symptom of failure I talked about in my blog - NO EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION WITH CUSTOMERS - is a major symtom of LL's non-grasp of the critical importance of Customer Service.  If Customer Service is not a priority to a company, what is the value in communicating with a Customer?

LL's culture is that "we created and own and manage the SL grid.  There are no such things as customers, you are all residents of the grid.  You are an active part of our virtual world simulation.  Since we are the Gods of this virtual world, we also obviously know whats best for the virtual world as the little ants that scurry around in it.  We do not need to tell you anything - so just consider it a blessing from God that we even tell you anything.".

As such, it explains why Brooke Linden deals with her customers like she does and Oskar Linden scolds one of his customers that is frustrated when his team causes major grief and takes no mature actions like backing out buggy code (which most mature IT shops do).  And sadly this is also why it looks like Rodvik seems to have already been absorbed by the dark LL Startup culture of "customer service is only some that is best promised but never served".

and Sassy, you are dead on accurate on LL's demise if they ever successfully gain a small but large revenue source like Enterprise accounts.  It would destroy their company. 

LL lives now because its very hard to lose 100's of thousands of micro customers.  So as horrible as their Customer Service is, they hold onto the comforting knowledge that their actions cant lose ALL their customers at one time.

This is not the case with enterprise accounts.  And as a person that works for IT management for an international company, I can tell you this with 100% certainty.  LL would not last as one of our vendors.  Forget about a contract not being renewed, with LL's complete misunderstanding of customer service and zero maturity of controls, we would boot them out as a vendor for breach of contract (not meeting levels of service).  We have done it before and with LL we surely we do it before their contract ever concluded.

So LL.... be thankful you have 100's of thousands of us little customers that either love SL so blindly that they will defend your incompetence or that they bitch and complain vocally on forums is vain hopes that maybe we can enjoy SL and improve the weaknesses of LL.

Without us customers - YOU ARE DEAD.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Well I do hope that when Rodvik reads my post, that it further pushes him into enlightenment that he cannot just focus on all the shiny toys like MESH and that he needs to focus the more fundamental critical weakness of LL that is risking his company's future.

Rodvik cant continue flinging around the lip service of "customer service is critical" and yet not show any clear evidence that he is tackling it.

Right now with how the LL Commerce Team has handled their operations, Rodvik's ZERO response to the Merchant community is showing that he just wants to put his head in the sand of Customer Service and lost credibility / trust.

A strong and determined CEO would be handling this differently when one of his major product groups impacts a major segment of his customer base.

So far, Rodvik seems to have been pulled into the LL Startup Culture Borg like all past Sr. LL management has.

 

[Josh Susanto]

I think Rodvik may still just be trying to get a proper handle on things.

If SL is still ultimately profitable, one could argue (for a while yet, anyway), that, as a whole, it is not "broken".

Replacing people is a bigger "fix" than replacing code, so even if the code is broken, there's a danger of breaking the deeper (still profitable) company infrastructure by trying to fix what is arguably "not broken" anyway.

But the "aint broke" idea is something, which, if Rodvik is applying that, I must implore him not to apply.

It's the equivalent of the Captain of the Titanic thinking "why would we hit an iceberg when we've never hit one before?".

There's a black swan for YOU, Rod, just beyond the event horizon, and it's got precious little to do with any specific piece of code. Look for gravity wells. Looks for Hawking radiation. It's all there. Other Lindens are inevitably seeing it if you can just get them to say so.

ASK.