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Talla Slade

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    BK Linden

    Linden Lab's New CEO

    in Featured News

    A group blog by Secondlife in General

    Posted

    Welcome to Second Life, Rod.

    May I advise you be very very careful where you tread and who you tread on. The looney Lindens have a terrible habbit of doing just that. There is a very vocal minority that squeeks a lot too - I know, I'm one of them. We have fragil tempers these days since we have been pushed about so much and our pockets sucked dry for the privilige of doing something creative with the platform you gave us. We are tired of Linden crackpot ideas and rolling restarts and more and more controls and having a bunch of kids dumped on us to worry about.

    However well intentioned we really don't want you to poke your noses in what we do. It's our world remember?  You told us that long ago. We made it what it is not you. We don't trust Lindens. We actually don't like you very much either most of the time.

    We try to have fun and escape the riggers of the real world and then you go spoiling it all with one new control after another. Its tiresome. You kill off our inworld businesses with Web sales. Our malls grow silent. You do everything in your power to piss us off and don't fix the things we want fixed most, the lag (oh the lag!), the search (oh the search!). the script errors, the transaction errors, the lost inventory, the list goes on.

    Are you sure this is the Job for you, Rod?

    Anyway, welcome to the sinking ship.

    I want to be grateful to you but you make it so hard

    Here are some predictions for 2011

    http://metaverse-traveller.blogspot.com/

    Nelson Linden

    Posted

    @Samuel Geiger

    Oh I agree but none the less, merging the teen grid will add some more traffic to the main gird. Maybe LL will even restore the figures to the login screen!

     

    @ Montana Corleone

    Yes, that's true. They did open an office in the UK back when they really believed SL would hit big time. It didn't happen of course and LL has since sacked a third of it's staff and closed the UK office. They are still charging the VAT though.

    Nelson Linden

    Posted

    Some people have no time for the opinions of others and the best they can do is shoot abuse and make threats. What they don't seem to be able to do is offer a constructive response to the debate or a well-argued rebuttle of what they don't agree with. In fact, generally, they can't string more than few lines together that is not abuse. I meet people like this all the time in SL.  I think everyone dose but we tend to treat them as an irritation that needs a scratch rather than something to lose sleep over. If they are particualarly bad we call them griefers and ban them from our sims or even file abuse reports when they become threatening.

    Nelson Linden

    Posted

    Oh, I absolutely agree, Rene. Opensim can not be stopped now. It's real strength is the open source nature of the project, the low cost and the sheer level of freedom it promises. The tech is catching up fast and, in some areas, has already exceeded SL capability.

    Blue Mars doesn't allow on the fly building and content creation and it is not cheap either but it is superior to SL and OS at the moment if you have a good graphics card, decent PC and connection. And, of course, it's another grid with an iron curtain round it like SL. If they fold you will loose everything you paid for unless you managed to get some of your content downloaded to your hard drive - impossible to do unless it's full perm.

    Not so with Opensim, which is, by it's very nature, by and large yours!

    Like you, Rene. I am not there in Opensim yet but I do visit many grids and keep informed. I have 4 Sims dedicated to role play and sailing in SL and, presently, I am doing fine here despite the gloomy outlook for SL, and my sales have actually gone up in-world but that has probably more to do with selling themed items for the role play than anything LL is doing for me. So there is no advise I can give to vendors accept, "you gotta have a gimmick!"

    My gimmick, such that it is, is the role play theme I promote but that is a niche market. LL needs to listen to it's customers and entrepreneurs and focus on reviving in-world sales and simply stop going off in the clouds with wasteful projects that do nothing to bring in new members. More importantly, they need to review their pricing policy. If one can get a full sim up and running on Opensim for as little as $10 a month then LL is going to have to compete with that or die.

    Nelson Linden

    Posted

    If anyone is wondering where all the Lindens who got sacked went then some at least have gone to rival Opensim. John Lester - formerly Pathfinder Linden - has launched the Hypergrid Adventurers Club, inspiring many to travel around the hypergrid. Lester has recently been hired to head up community outreach at ReactionGrid, a rapidly growing Opensim-based grid. See this link: http://becunningandfulloftricks.com/hypergrid-adventurers-club/

     

    I also found an article giving growth statistics for Opensim compared to SecondLife. It makes interesting reading. See this link: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2010/11/another-record-month-for-opensim/

     

    It doesn't surprise me LL has stopped publishing the user concurrency figures on the viewer login screen. They are dropping seriously!

     

    The figures have been pretty static for the last 2 years but in the past six months they have taken a nose-dive struggling to get to 60K and often not getting above 50K and that is peek numbers. Off-peek is abysmal at around 30K and less!

     

    We all know LL manipulates their statistics but now they are getting so bad they just don't publish at all. That is, in itself, very telling. Well, we seem to go from one fiasco to another so it can only be expected to get worse. Adding VAT, a European tax, they had no obligation to collect pushed out European land lords to start with then the Open Spaces fiasco pushed small builders and home makes off land and now LL favouring Land barons with discounts is pushing the remaining small land lords out while LL keep general land tier inflated for everyone else. Not just that but now education and none-profits are going to have to pay full price. It really is a scam!

     

    Given this state of affairs and the fact Linden Labs is pushing web sales rather than promoting in-world sales it's not surprising that the stores and malls are closing. LL can add mesh to the viewer and other shinny features that geeks might find useful in the short term but Opensim is adding the same stuff and Blue Mars already has it. What LL is doing now is too little, too late. The damage they are doing to the economy is too great to inspire confidence that SecondLife has a long-term future.

    Nelson Linden

    Posted

    @Rene Erlanger

    Thanks Rene...

    I don't want to over-egg Opensim because it still faces some difficult challenges before it can truly get into a beta state. Hypergrid 1.5 dose now give some security to content creators however but it's limited and far from a full solution. But it is developing and that is what I base my argument on. People are not leaving SL in droves as might be supposed but many are spending more time away. Nearly everyone I speak to tells me they are interested in OS or are already there. I've been dabbling myself for the past two years since Open Spaces which got me into it originally so I know the pace of development and I have seen the steady growth. And recently the growth has accelerated probably because of apathy in SL and people now really starting to ask themselves why they pay so much for SecondLife hosting and why is it possible for OS hosts to deliver as good at a fraction of the cost.

    If I am right, and I really think I am, a lot of the decline in SL is due in no small part to the rise of the free metaverse and other proprietary grids as I stated above. I do not take the Lindens for total fools though. They know full well what they are up against and the recent cost-cutting, sackings and killing of projects that don't offer an immediate result show us this is the case. The accelerated development of Mesh, Viewer 2, media on a prim, name spaces, etc all smack of a desperate bid to stay ahead of the growing competition - things LL could have done long ago had they not gone off-track with dreams of an SL_Facebook revolution.

    Linden Labs needs to cut the cost of their hosting now for it is, in my view, the surest way to bring noobs in and oldbies back.

    Dare I say it?

    Yeah, the birdy has come home to roost. Ignore the long-standing users, role players, builders and merchants at your peril. A lot of them have gone elsewhere and elsewhere is starting to look too good to ignore now!

    Nelson Linden

    Posted

    There is a lot of apathy in SecondLife and while I have seen my sales going up despite the gloomy figures given above I am in no doubt that LL is facing growing competition from Opensim and others like Blue Mars.

    SecondLife is expensive and if one looks back to the Open Spaces fiasco two years ago it was clear a lot of people could not afford to build their dream homes at the current cost of an island sim. Open Space sims allowed many to build, albeit at a restricted level. Homesteads were introduced in response to this demand but the price point was still going to be too high for a lot of people. Many gave up and went to the outside grids based on Open Simulator and, while they could build cheaper, the experience for most was nothing like what they were use to in SL. There was no economy or currency to speak of back then and the content was third rate (not counting copybotted stuff). A lot of things didn't function and scripting was still way behind. But, two years on the story has changed dramatically!

    Able hosting companies have moved in which has drastically improved performance and the price point to rent a sim is as little as $10 a month. Laggy standalones on home computers are declining too since hosting options return better results cheaply and a huge number of people that used to have a home in SL now find they can do all the building they like with 15K prims and little restriction. Currencies are available too now but the trade in freebees is still flourishing simply because SL content creators are skeptical and worry about copyright theft. Content is not all third rate any more either. But here is a fact...

    If you can get a $10 a month sim in Opensim to adequately build your home and are happy to spend time there as many do (many in fact create content in OS and import back to SL) then why would you bother with SL?

    Well, most of them do spend time in SL and OS regardless. That is the trend now. Even some of the role players are building their RPG's in OS and certainly educational institutions see the value now LL is dropping charity discounts.

    People still buy stuff in SL for use in SL and probably use web shopping more too ( I know I prefer to now), but if many are spending more time in Opensim it stands to reason they will not spend as much here. Why would they need too?

    I know all the arguments against Opensim but one by one those arguments are being steadily addressed as the platform continues to develop and I would ague that SecondLife is being steadily challenged by that march of progress. However, contrary to apparent support I seem to be giving Opensim in this post, I do really hope LL will put their act back together and working with the free metaverse, finding new ways to do business and attract users, might actually be beneficial to business in SL.

    Opensim still doesn't have the traffic SL enjoys but most OS users don't care. Most are not trying to make money and are happy to enjoy their cheap homes and have a few friends over from SL, maybe a party or a meeting away from the bustle and griefers of SL, or even a mega region for sailing greater expanses without border crossings. The latest version of Hypergrid in OS allows safe teleporting from one grid to another with appearance and even allows goods to be bought and brought back home. I could give many more reasons but suffice to say, Opensim is coming of age now and this will continue to impact on SecondLife and it's economy to an ever greater degree.

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