DD for Merchants...Impact on our Inventories

[Darrius Gothly]

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Rival Destiny wrote:

(..snip..)

I suppose it all depends on what the software is used for and the expectations of the users.

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There's the true measure ... thank you.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Rival Destiny wrote:

I was thinking about what is in store for me to make this change over to DD for my MP store. 

First I have to install a viewer that will accomodate the new DD system, then I have to follow the procedure to change over my magic boxes to folders in my inventory.

Then I started to wonder about all the thousands and thousands of products on the MP and what kind of impact is this going to have on the inventory servers?

Has LL poinied up & purchased new serviers to take up the slack here or am I not understanding how our inventory is stored.

I'm concerned about not only inventory loading but also the present inventory tree that we now have.  Is there any plans in place to improve upon the system as it is? 

And number of items we have in invetory which grows each day.  Right now I store things in boxes, in world, alts etc. 

Am considering the impact on my own inventory and wonder what other's thoughts are in this regard.

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I don't understand what the issue is with upgrading your viewer.. Did you complain when they added mesh and we had to upgrade?

Are you saying that you don't have a copy of each and every item you sell in your inventory? If so, that sounds like a bad idea in the making.. what if your magic box gets eaten by LL? I have a copy of my magic box inventory in a folder and a copy that is boxed. All i had to do was drag the folder into the Merchants outbox.

I would hope that everyone has a copy of their items....

Personally i think it is a stupid idea from LL standpoint. Now there is absolutely ZERO reason for a merchant to rent land.

[Sassy Romano]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Personally i think it is a stupid idea from LL standpoint. Now there is absolutely ZERO reason for a merchant to rent land.

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I've seen this said so many times and I just don't get it.  Merchants never really had to rent land for a magic box.  Technically yes but there are places that rent by the prim specifically for this purpose and would cost just a few L$'s per week to rent precisely 1 prim.

If the whole of a merchants business plan is around selling via Marketplace then that 1 prim inworld really isn't going to be much of a loss to LL and unless someone wants to build solely in a public sandbox then isn't having their own space to create and leave rezzed "works in progress" somewhat more significant than that 1 prim for the Magic Box?

So a merchant can close their mainstore if they wish, if they really want to put all their trust/faith/marketing into one place, Marketplace.  That's not the plan for everyone, where MP is only a minor part of the retail solution.

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Personally i think it is a stupid idea from LL standpoint. Now there is absolutely ZERO reason for a merchant to rent land.

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I've seen this said so many times and I just don't get it.  Merchants never really had to rent land for a magic box.  Technically yes but there are places that rent by the prim specifically for this purpose and would cost just a few L$'s per week to rent precisely 1 prim.

If the whole of a merchants business plan is around selling via Marketplace then that 1 prim inworld really isn't going to be much of a loss to LL and unless someone wants to build solely in a public sandbox then isn't having their own space to create and leave rezzed "works in progress" somewhat more significant than that 1 prim for the Magic Box?

So a merchant can close their mainstore if they wish, if they really want to put all their trust/faith/marketing into one place, Marketplace.  That's not the plan for everyone, where MP is only a minor part of the retail solution.

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Let me add to this myth about how MagicBoxes were bad because you had to rent land to have a magicbox.

I started selling on xstreet in june 2008.  I never rented my first land in SL until about spring of 2009 when I decided to also have an inworld store presence.  So what did I do if I never had any rent or land to speak up until a year later???

Well for the first 8 months I had one friend that had a sim where she ran a club.  I asked her if it was OK if I plant my 1 prim magicbox under a tree on her land.  It was out of sight to her build and I knew where it was.  Whenever I needed to add items to my magicbox or maintain it I walked to the tree and edited my MB.  Ocassionally she would IM me asking me to move it to a new location because she was renovating.

After that I was asked to set up my stuff with someone that needed help with her mall to market.  So I took my magicbox and put it in the corner of her mall.  Then I finally rented my own parcel of land where my magicbox has been sitting since 2009.

But I have never rented land in SL for the purpose of finding a home for me Magicbox.

There might be reasons why the Magicbox was bad but this is one of the more bogus arguments.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

I didnt say they were bad.. i said there is no reason for a merchant to rent land now..

yes i have an inworld store, mainly because i have had one  before i used Xstreet. Since i started selling on Xstreet and now the MP i have had my magic box in my store.. That being said.. unless you are lucky enough to have a friend that will let you use their land or you rent land for a home, you no longer need to rent any land.

why they couldnt just have a folder and have us copy the contents of the magic box inrto it and have NOTHING change in the MP i dont know. they have caused a huge clusterbomb with this. and again we are held responsible by the general SLer.

when can we expect our 2 days of commission free selling this time?

[Josh Susanto]

>Yes, that's the best news since this whole DD thing was deployed, even if delivered in odd language. 

Better news would be "no deadline", which is what they had before, and which they should still have, because it was considered to be good enough when they still believed DD was going to deploy OK.

(think about it)

[Josh Susanto]

> the state of DD today is much better than folks give it credit. 

I can't say I'm not disappointed with the total impact of DD.

But what's got me all p'd off again isn't the technical failures.

What's got me p'd off is the completely backwards way LL tried to prepare people for the deployment.

They should have warned us that it would probably be full of bugs (which I knew anyway) and told us what we could do to mitigate the impact to our businesses. But they instead acted like we'd be idiots not to join them in expecting a flawless deployment that would instantly solve all the pre-existing problems; they even spent 6 months actively discouraging us from demanding any fixes to the existing system "because DD is just around the corner anyway". 

Moreover, they not only gambled our trust on their own misplaced self-confidence, they also utterly failed to prepare any kind of contingency plan for anything that might have gone wrong. 

I'm pretty sure that ANY software company for which you've worked devotes some amount of budget and planning time to damage control and explores various scenarios for bad deployment outcomes.

I am 100% convinced that LL simply does not do this. 

It makes me think that, maybe if I want LL to start taking their own risks seriously, I should just send the SFPD to look at LL's fire extinguishers (meaning, if they bother to have any, since ... you know... there's no fire, right?).

[Josh Susanto]

>I don't understand what the issue is with upgrading your viewer.. Did you complain when they added mesh and we had to upgrade?

Yes.

But my complaint wasn't the need to upgrade.

My complaint was that only SL's viewer could see mesh at first, and SL's own viewers continue to be almost total crap.

If they want to create new features that require me to use their own viewer, I'd be fine with that in principle, but they should then also provide a viewer that doesn't feel like being forced to make a circle on an etch-a-sketch while standing on one foot, blindfolded. 

[Josh Susanto]

>Now there is absolutely ZERO reason for a merchant to rent land.

Bingo.

And now you know why LL has been gradually making the SLM less and less useful, including with the DD mandatory downgrade, while pretending to try to make it work better.

When the SLM is finally shut down, the problem will have been solved that Xstreet was reducing demand for in-world commercial rentals, and LL can say "but we were just trying to help!".

[Josh Susanto]

>Merchants never really had to rent land for a magic box.

Exactly.

And that was one of the problems that LL will have solved by first making us give up the Magic Boxes and then making at least most of us give the DD as well.

Merchants selling stuff without renting land means less revenue for LL. 

But buying out Xstreet just to shut it down directly would probably have created some legal exposures in terms of antitrust legislation.

Pretending to try to improve the system while actually crippling it makes it look less like monopoly maintenance.

[Sera Lok]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

 

My complaint was that only SL's viewer could see mesh at first, and SL's own viewers continue to be almost total crap.

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This is what happens when the majority of users give up on LL viewers and refuse to use them, and the majority of LL employees spend so little time doing anything inworld other than going to meetings.  The default viewer suffers.

That said, I've been using the latest LL v3 for a few months now and I am ok with it.  I have heard SO many people say they'll never use a LL viewer again, and many of them aren't even aware there is a V3, so many still refer to V2 (which WAS horrible, imo). 

Now that Firestorm has the FUI, and so few know that this is an LL design, I'm sure they will be getting a lot of the credit from users for LL's UI design, which is amusing.  I'm sure already there have been expressions like "omg you made the viewer so much better we can drag our buttons around LL fails you guys are the best!" when in fact it's LL supplying that design.  But there is good reason for that actually - the Firestorm team actually communicates, provides viewer support, and is open to user feedback, whereas the LL team is dysfunctional in all those aspects.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

The DD car has less than a hundred miles on it. So far it's been driven from factory to truck to the dealer and been test driven for a couple of weeks. Is that conclusive?

Or, how long does it take an employer to realize that the employees just aren't up to the task in general? How many bugs are too many?

Basic requirements here are that it gets from point A to point B reliably (not yet established and last years model has failed), that the gauges tell you what you need to know (reporting inadequate, records don't reconcile, funds are mangled) and that the passengers arrive safely (many of them seem to suffer from air-bag rash, with or without DD).

This the kind of thing you'd consider acceptable in your software company? Hey, it appears that you may have gotten something right! You can stay another year!

 

[Josh Susanto]

>But I have never rented land in SL for the purpose of finding a home for me Magicbox.

I did at first, but only because I wanted to be able to hold someone responsible for keeping the sim working correctly.

Ironically, that just put my box on the map with others, conspicuously ready to get borked.

I always figured I could get a few people to let me install a really nice plant or rock on their land that would also be a magic box, but they would still have been doing me a favor, so I wouldn't have been in a position to demand consistent service or leaving the prim in-situ or try to get them not to lag the sim with a bunch of other scripts.

But the most important point to understand about magic boxes not requiring land rental is that:

if you just keep an avatar on one of the Linden sims and attach a box to it, the box works JUST FINE. 

Since Malefactor Linden apparently never figured out a way to bork that, it would only have been a matter of time before people other than me bothered to test it out, and the need for DD would have become a lot less clear, while, also, merchants and/or merchant alts might start camping out a lot on Linden land, especially when things like deployments have been announced. 

Thus the urgency to separate merchants from their magic boxes; not regardless of how well the boxes really work, but because of how well they really work.

[Darrius Gothly]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

>

 the state of DD today is much better than folks give it credit. 

I can't say I'm not disappointed with the total impact of DD.

But what's got me all p'd off again isn't the technical failures.

What's got me p'd off is the completely backwards way LL tried to prepare people for the deployment.

They should have warned us that it would probably be full of bugs (which I knew anyway) and told us what we could do to mitigate the impact to our businesses. But they instead acted like we'd be idiots not to join them in expecting a flawless deployment that would instantly solve all the pre-existing problems; they even spent 6 months actively discouraging us from demanding any fixes to the existing system "because DD is just around the corner anyway". 

Moreover, they not only gambled our trust on their own misplaced self-confidence, they also utterly failed to prepare any kind of contingency plan for anything that might have gone wrong. 

I'm pretty sure that ANY software company for which you've worked devotes

some

amount of budget and planning time to damage control and explores various scenarios for bad deployment outcomes.

I am 100% convinced that LL simply

does not do this. 

It makes me think that, maybe if I want LL to start taking their own risks seriously, I should just send the SFPD to look at LL's fire extinguishers (meaning, if they bother to have any, since ... you know... there's no fire, right?).

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No arguments here. And yeah, we would normally take database snapshots right before and at various times during the deployment and fixes. I'm betting there isn't one available .. anywhere.

[Josh Susanto]

>Or, how long does it take an employer to realize that the employees just aren't up to the task in general? How many bugs are too many?

That's really the elephant in the living room, isn't it?

Forget the technical aspects of the problem for a minute.

How many GOOD decisions have you seen LL make in the last 8 months?

And how many of those were not merely improving upon some earlier bad decision?

If people are ultimately being paid just to make bad decisions (and possibly to make even worse decisions first) wouldn't it be more efficient just to pay them to make no decisions at all?

Of course, then, you might also consider not paying them to not make those decisions...

[Josh Susanto]

>I'm betting there isn't one available .. anywhere.

Under what conditions would you expect that to be made available by subpoena?

[Josh Susanto]

>when can we expect our 2 days of commission free selling this time?

Any time you like.

Just lower all your prices to 9L.

[Darrius Gothly]

When the heck did we switch sides?!? ROFL!!

No, the current state of affairs is not acceptable in the grander "compared to others" sense. But nor is it a 100% failure either. As with most things, the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

I do not understand why the Lab insists on tasking employees with duties that are clearly out of their skill set, although I've also seen glimpses that someone on the Commerce Dev Team is experienced with UI and software development. (For example, the automatic replacement of MB items with DD items when the names match, and the nicely visible and well placed "Are you sure?" prompts that have appeared.) These are finesse things that wouldn't have been considered before, but they are included in this release, so I get the distinct impression that at least someone on the team has some notches on their keyboard.

The way the LL staff is utilized is one of the reasons that I keep looking for someone above Brooke but below Rodvik that is responsible for assigning people to tasks. And also is responsible for deciding to accept the team's recommendations or override them and "do it differently". I'm pretty sure you have, and I know I have, worked for bosses that while not really steeped in software development intracacies were at least willing to listen and let the team have their head if they were making sense. I've also worked for bosses that were just as clueless, but for some reason fancied themselves as "Experts" in every stage of the development process and often overrode the dev team with ludicrous demands ... for no reason other than to demonstrate their control of the project. (Using their power to stroke their own ego, irregardless of how much damage it did to the software or the company.)

Maybe I'm wrong, but I keep getting whiffs of the latter situation at LL .. I just don't know who it might be or where they are located. But it's those whiffs that keep me from fully roasting the Commerce Dev Team over an open flame pit; I keep thinking they're not doing these things from their own incompetence, they are being instructed to be purposely destructive so that someone else can feel they are "in charge".

[Darrius Gothly]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

>

I'm betting there isn't one available .. anywhere.

Under what conditions would you expect that to be made available by subpoena?

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Not available to us .. available to them so they can roll back the products database and fix the cross linking.

[Sassy Romano]

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Sera Lok wrote:

Now that Firestorm has the FUI, and so few know that this is an LL design, I'm sure they will be getting a lot of the credit from users for LL's UI design, which is amusing. 

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I said exactly that to a few.  In fact Firestorm was about the LAST viewer to come up to the version 3 FUI.

[Sassy Romano]

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

No arguments here. And yeah, we would normally take database snapshots right before and at various times during the deployment and fixes. I'm betting there isn't one available .. anywhere.

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Even a backup won't do wonders for them here since this is also during a migration.  To what point do they roll it back?  Some merchants will have totally migrated and removed magic boxes.

Can they really expect to roll back to a point in time that then requires that they announce to everyone:-

"We've rolled back 2 weeks, if you migrated, please put your magic box back out, create all your listings again and then re-migrate..."

Reverting to Magic Box is a pain in the ass at best.

I don't see it being an option.  *chomps more popcorn*

[Rival Destiny]

I'm wondering if we all will end up with both in the end...some still maintaining magic boxes some on the new DD system while it goes in the 'not quite working/borked todo later (maybe) folder'.  I do think LL has a rather large one of those.

[Darrius Gothly]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Can they really expect to roll back to a point in time that then requires that they announce to everyone:-

"We've rolled back 2 weeks, if you migrated, please put your magic box back out, create all your listings again and then re-migrate..."

Reverting to Magic Box is a pain in the ass at best.

I don't see it being an option.  *chomps more popcorn*

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I've mentioned elsewhere about doing a consistency check. That process will identify which listings are borked. it then becomes a simple matter to compare the borked product listing with the original listing as it existed before DD was released.

The only thing that changed during the migration was the Associated Object ... from a Magic Box item to a DD Folder. But the parts that are now borked did not change in the migration; things such as the Product Images. Comparing the two listings, pre-released and current version that fails consitency check, it becomes a simple matter to set the borked fields to their correct pre-release values and .. Presto!! Borkus Gonus.

A simple overnight process would result in fixing all the errors and restoring the Marketplace to a much higher level of functionality .. as well as restoring some of the lost faith and trust.

[Ilyra Chardin]

From the outside looking in, as I’ve not switched over to DD, it does look bleak.  In typical fashion LL did a big bang roll-out without any sort of consideration of scalability and performance.  There’s a big push away from in world shopping to the online MP and the performance has been severely impacted.  On top of that, they appear to have serious database corruption and I’m not sure that they can solve that with a simple reference check.  It is entirely possible that the data has been loaded such that the only fix is to address each item one by one as it is reported.  And there is the functionality or lack thereof.  With the magic boxes you can visually SEE what you’ve placed in them and update items easily.  When you upload to MP using DD, the items completely disappear, you have to “do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around” to update them – and that’s if everything were to function properly.

I saw your comments to Josh about waiting until the last minute.  I’m not yet sure about this.  LL has a long standing history of announcing that things are going away, pushing out the date, and then not really following through.  There are people still using the last release of viewer 1.

All in all, i suppose that there is a kind of numbness – a wait and see – that settles in and some blind faith that, given a year or so, they might actually make this work really well.  For now, it appears as it has to me for some time – the metaverse that they maintain seems to be quite a few steps ahead of them.

My two cents (L$5)

[Rival Destiny]

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Ilyra Chardin wrote:

<respectfully snipped for space>

  When you upload to MP using DD, the items completely disappear, you have to

“do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around”

to update them – and that’s if everything were to function properly.

I saw your comments to Josh about waiting until the last minute.  I’m not yet sure about this. 

LL has a long standing history of announcing that things are going away, pushing out the date, and then not really following through.  There are people still using the last release of viewer 1.

<snipped>

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I luv the hokey pokey!

Anyway, exactly my point earlier is LL's tendancy to not only be reactive instead of proactive, but to leave an issue in suspended animation as it were, (in that todo (maybe) folder) when something just doesn't quite fly or even get off the ground.  Then, quickly move on to something else - usually something else that isn't broken.