Ebbe Linden

Wow, you are an angry person. Ok, so, why are you so angry?

Agreed

Thanks! All I'm going to reply with here is that we're not in the content business. Our customers are the creators of content and expereinces. Without the creators SL and the future product/platform would be empty.

Thanks! Yes. And it seems like I'm certainly starting the convestation early enough, some of our customers suggesting maybe too early...

Thanks! That creative freedom and social connections is part of the magic. We just want you to be able to make even better cats and have even better social experiences and for you and others to be able to share those experiences with many more people...spirit of SL but better...and, again, it will take time, but if we wait until someone forces our hand it may be too late, so time to go for it is now.

It will take a long time. So SL will continue to be there and we'll continue to improve it. And we'll do the absolute best we can to help you all get going on the new product when it's ready. How exactly and when exactly and how long etc. we will find out with time. But we have to make this invesment in the future to make what we all enjoy much much better.

I'm not sure what you are suggesting or asking. SL is donig great, it's better than it's ever been. And we want to make something that's even greater, but to make it increadible there are areas where we just have to move forward and do some things in new ways and thus can't guarantee 100% backwards compatability. And it will be years.

You asked: 1. Landscaping and building my parcel (Frank Lloyd Wright inspired "Falling Water") has taken years and at least $1,000 to build and get right. Will I be able to move en masse this work and contents, or will LL make it just disappear? 2. Laptops with Intel graphics were purchased by many of my friends a few years ago, "the latest and greatest with longer battery life". But they never worked with SL, which none of them realized in advance. Since they are not made of money, they simply left SL forever. Sad, eh? Will the new world finish off the rest of us without the kick-ass PCs your LL engineers all have? 3. What if the "new world" fails to draw people away from their HUGE investments in old SL? Remember, 80% of SL isCHAT with a wonderful community (now half the size it once was), with the world itself being fun but NOT the core of SL imho. First, SL will be around for a long time. Years. Some things will be possible to move over, other things not. More details on this over time as we figure out more details. So no, it won't just disappear. We're going to make the next generation faster so expect things to work equal or better with like for liek content. But we're also adding a lot of capabilites for content creators to create much cooler stuff that could decrease performance. I'm not going to contemplate failure. The SL community is not half the size, not even close, maybe for your community but not in overall metrics. Still going strong. And we clearly want to move identities and communities forward as well as we can as that is core to the success today.

So you think SL can continue forever and still be competitive enought to matter in the future? We are going to do our best to make it smooth, but if we have to make a crappy product with crazy complexity and poor user experience to preserve some very specific content compatability we don't want to cause those problems. A lot of what you have will be possible to move across and more specifics will come through over time.

Agreed, just a bit early to be that specific. More to come....

It may. It would if another company did a better VW. But not investing in the future is not the answer so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. We're obviously going to do our best to make it a positive experience for existing as well as new users.

Yep, we sure want to make it so your identity and connections and whatever elese makes sense stay intact as you try the new thing.

Thanks. We will clearly try to make sure things work out for the best for our users and that we are fair (although I can't guarantee that all will be happy; some will be happier, some will find their niche is less valuable and a large number of new users will find new ways to create that hasn't been done before). I ended up posting where there was volume on the topic. I don't worry too much if it's "my" board or someone elses...as long as there's useful dialog I'm ok...

Thanks. So FB/Oculus came out and said they are going to do a VW for a billoin people. I did not hear a peep from anyone here. How compatibale will that world be? When will all users run over to that one? Should I invest in SL now that they are donig that...etc. If all users move rather quickly from SL to our next gen then I assume things went very well. If few are, then I think we'd have more work to do and SL will keep on tickin until only the new one makes sense to operate... I can't give a clear path for exactly when and how this transition may or may not happen (could be that they are side by side for a very long time). All I've said is that we're doing it, we're going to invest a lot to do it, and that from now on forward we'll all be talking about it with more and more detail as time goes by. You'll be along for the ride. Trying to hide it for a long period where we can answer all the questions by the time we do reveal it I don't think would work becuase it would come out anyway and second, I want to have dialog with you all about it rather than come up with all the answers first (and then get yelled at for not including you sooner . So, my recommendation is that if you have interest in VW then use the best product there is (SL) and as time goes on we will figure out how to make it worthwhile for you to stay with us and work through the transition over time . But none of us can predict what the world will look like 2 years from now (regardless of what we do or do not do).

I'm being honest and you don't seem to like it. Ok. I did not say at all that everything will be obsolete. I have no idea where you get that from. What I did say is that we will not sacrifice how good the future product will be because we have to twist ourselves in knots to be 100% backwards compatable. Basically we are saying that a better product is more important than making sure everything is SL as you know it will continue unchanged. That could end up just being an upgrade rather than a major step forward.

I'm not sure what you're angry about....

So you're not worried that another company could attract enough people to hurt your business but you're concerned that we are trying to make sure there's a long future ahead for Linden Lab and our customers?

So we'll talk about it. Or maybe I could have kept you in the dark for another month or two until it leaked out anyway (hard to hide such a big effort). And we have a long way to go to have all the answers to all the questions you may want. I figured sooner is better than later (even thought we don't have all the answers).

I don't understand what you mean. Anything we would do to collect money you can describe as a tax. No tax, no money, no business, no product... Subscriptions, sales tax, property tax, feature unlocking, storage, transaction fees, utility bills...lots of ways...all I've said so far is that the property tax is too high (everybody agrees) and that I think sales tax (non inworld for example) is probably too low.

Why does that matter? It's going to be a conversation we'll have for a long time. It's started now. Does it really matter how?

It wasn't totally planned but it was about to come out soon regardless...and I'm here talking to you (but don't expect me to tell you all you want to know)

More speculation. Not sure a press release would stop any of that. Some core elements have been worked on for a while. A major effort, including a lot of hiring, is more recent. Not going to see some "modded version"...

I'm here. Reading everything. But there are a lof questions I can't (or won't) answer at this time. And it's also good to see you all talking amongst yourselves and I've already seen that dialog trend in a positive direction.

I don't think we can assume that the SL tech and experience as we know it can last forever and that something better will not come around some day. It's either us or someone else. By letting you know that we are working on something I've already seen a lot of positives come out, and yes, some doomsday stuff, but there are always a group of people who dislike change (even for the better). So, in the future, you will move to something better, and we plan to provide that.

Why are you guessing that? I have not hinted that we would do that and have no intent to go in that direction.