Linden Lab is a Research Facility

Problem is, the marketing department is busy going great guns as if this were a usable, reasonably finished product! What with all the media coverage, etc.

I worry about all those 10k new users we got in the past week or so who have come into all this with 1.7. And if they were here for the crashing of the grid by our own personal group of tolerated criminals, they must be getting a bad impression, not realising that SL isn't always this way.

coco

Getting back to Khamon's original post, Linden Lab's parent company is Linden Reseach, Inc. If you goto their website and then to About Linden Lab, you will find what appears to be the Mission and Strategy Statement. The first sentence in the Mission Statement is:

"Linden Lab is a privately held company established to develop an extraordinary new form of shared 3D entertainment."

The key word in that statement is 'develop'...as in the term research and development. The statement goes on to mention its 'first product', Second Life. Another important phrase, 'first product'. This directly implies that Linden Research is actively in pursuit of its mission to perform R&D with the goal "to develop an extraordinary new form of shared 3D entertainment." In other words, SL is a vehicle, or demonstration project that the industry and investors can see, touch and experience. In the healthcare industry, Sl would be termed a clinical trial.

Khamon is correct, Linden Lab is basically a R&D company. We, the residents of SL, are sort of like the lab rats, if you will permit me to again use the comparison to the healthcare industry.

I guess, a certain level of 'customer' service is inherently required towards the maintenance and upkeep of the participants in the demonstration product. We are fed, cared for and maintained in a clean and dry environment - with periodic upgrades to our accomodations.

"Hey, who moved the cheese!!?"

See ya, in the lab, Khamon.

What? All software companies research and develop, and say that they research and develop, that doesn't make them R&D companies. Or, alternatively, it makes them all R&D companies. Name me one software company that, if asked, wouldn't say they researched and developed their products?

Oh and it's spin

Heh. So if this were the case, then I'd have to proclaim Blizzard, Sony as well as many other companies who use the same kind of technology as R&D Companies. Uh, well HELLO.. all companies have some form of R&D division. It's the basics of business development. So classifying Linden Lab strictly as a research facilty would technically be FALSE. It's a business, that engages R&D like every other company to improve their product.

I think to say, that's fairly common sense.

When LL messes up, it is is "Research Facility." Generally, around this same time, SL starts being called a "beta."

When things are running reasonably smoothly, its just a company.

Are you Hem,Haw, Sniff or Scurry? Nifty little story I might add SL is a perfect example of the cheese being moved on all of us and the warning signs were there, all over the walls.

Being a feline avatar, flush some of these lab rats my way, they are tastey dipped in chocolate with a bowl of milk

Isn't that normal computer behavior when you're running Windows?



P2

I have been a member of the Second Life community since February of 2004. I pay a rather high tier, and I enjoy the time I spend "in-world". Over the last year and a half, I have witnessed many changes in the Second Life environment and community. I am very appreciative of the work that has been done by Linden Lab, as well as many members of the SL community. Many thanks to all of you for your hard work.

That said, I really feel I need to voice my opinion at this time.

I work for one of the companies that is paying Linden Lab good money for restricted, exclusive island space. We expect a service for the money we are paying. When our space is unavailable, it is our customers who suffer, not the average Second Life user. We expect a certain level of customer service from the company known as Linden Lab, and we contract with them for a specific venue. To tell our customers to "go outside" or "read a book" or anything else for that matter is out of the question.

Please remember that there are islands and sims that Linden subscribers generally do not see. Not everyone is a typical user, and not everyone is participating in the environment for recreational purposes.

Let's look at another company that does research: Google has research projects that are labeled as such. For example, Gmail was considered at one point to be a research project, but you didn't see the users paying for the privilege to participate in the research.

Let's compare this to, say, PhotoShop. This application adds features and pushes the boundaries of image editing. This is expected with every software company in order for them to stay alive and compete in the ever-changing global marketplace. We do not see Adobe (the creators of PhotoShop) saying, "Oh, just go outside and read a book." Contrasted with Photoshop, we can look at The Gimp, a freeware, open source version of image editing software. The Gimp is ever-evolving and extremely bug-free, proven to be very reliable. They make no excuses for their software, because they don't need to.

I can certainly understand that Second Life residents, as any users of any software, are supportive of their purchases. But chastising the user community for complaining about poor service, poor reliability, recurring bugs, and, let's face it, high prices, is just plain wrong, and bad marketing strategy.

Linden Lab, regardless of their name, is, when you get right down to it, just another gaming software company. Their focus should be on excellence and legendary customer service.

Good points, Palemoon. I will say one thing for LL, though. They are the absolute nicest, across the board, people I've ever run into. They are almost unfailingly polite and reasonable to everyone, no matter how upset or rude a person may be.

I'm sure there are exceptions here and there, but overall, one gets the impression that these are really nice, helpful people running SL. Not at all arrogant, and virtually never condescending. (As opposed to some of the posters!) This is very nice and not necessarily the norm in a gaming/platform/okra company, I think.

coco

Who knows for sure, a name is a name.

But if you go to the second life folder and check properties of the SL.EXE

under version tab - Copyright © 2001-2005, Linden Research, Inc.

Company: Linden Lab

well ll is backed by venture capital, and those boys sure expect a profit. In my book a pure research facility isa non-profit organization with a much more altruisitc purpose. LL is trying to provide a 3d entertainment media. these notions of the "mnetaverse" and an "altenate interet" are all fine and dandy, but that is not where sl is headed. It may be where ll is headed.

That being said, aol started out as an expensive toy with a very small user base. But then AOL developed along the principal of what the users wanted to do and not what they can do. The internet itself is largely a responsive technlogy-the easier and cheaper it was to use, the more people used it and the more new opportunities could flourish.

Just today I heard someone say that sl should be harder not easier to preserve the value of the linden. Right now the Linden is probably the biggest hinderence to the progress of SL. It means that development choices are being made to preserve an artificial economy-one that would be superflous if SL ever did become a 3-d browser.

right now sl is a toy in search of that quintessential application that makes 3d web browsing essential. So the real question becomes how do you pitch sl to the non-gamer? I think it does not involve keeping SL difficult to preserve the value of the linden. It does in volve, to my mind, keeping it easy for people to participate. And the interface needs to be simpler and simpler to facilitate people who don't want to learn the intricacies of a complex user interface, and who don't want to take advantage of all of sl's awesome capability. Ther eare for more people on the net that playy spider solitair than play HalfLife 2

The first 2 significant areas of research that came to my mind were health and vehicle crashworthiness . Both are primarily funded by private corporations with the dual goals of providing a health improvement to the general public at the same time as making a profit.

sure maragret but what youmust remember is that the same companies that fund all the crash worthiness tests, also push the SUV's on people because the safety standards for an suv are not as high as for a car, and thus SUV's are cheaper to make.

With respect to the pharmaceutical companies, they research for a profit, and the sate of health research suffers hugely for it.At the point the byproducts of pharmamcuetical companies are available to a public that can only afford the medications if they posess health insurance to conver the astronomical costs of such research. In trun the insurance compnaies willl tend to dictate to the health care providers what treatments are or are not available for particular conditions. Finally on the flip side, even of the authorized treatments the health insurance providers usually offer a substantial write off on the cost of the health care provided. In short its one huge racket to put money in the pocket of either the drug makers or the insuarance company.

And a substantiall portion of health research is conductied by non-profit foundations and insitituions, and by scinetists on grants from corporations who undoubtably take a huge tax write off for offering the funding.

Yes they by products of this research are beneficial to society, but don't be fooled into thinking research is not about profit. SL is the same way. Sure research is beig done, but LL is utlimately intended to be a profit making business, not a PARC research lab that spawns off new ideas for others to develop. Thus LL can and should be evaluated for the customer service they provide, and we residents are consumers not participants in some beta test for the metaverse.

Palemoon, are your company's mission critical servers hosted on a seperate grid complete with its own asset system, authenicator, space server et cetera? If so, it's a good thing for LL to offer that service to people who, I suppose, are willing to pay more for it. That grid can be updated with later, more stable, releases rather than the point upgrades the research grid processes.

I've never seen anyone at LL chastising The Community All Hail The Central Community for complaining about poor service. If anything, they apologize and assure us that they're working on it. They're typically very patient with us here, via email and inworld. In all fairness, I don't believe they view themselves as a research facility. I just believe that they are one.

If LL were a typical gaming, or any other kind of software, company, their focus would certainly be on excellence and legendary customer service. But their impression of that is pumping out random features as quickly as possible in a fun, free-for-all working environment and being just sugar sweet nice to us 24/7. I call that research.