From: Love Hastings
Unless you all post your real life name, your place of work, and your home address, all for verification purposes, you are all all hiding behind an alt. And therefore your opinion is meaningless. Because you're all cowards hiding your real world identities.
Well, that's the argument, right?
I'll clear all doubt now. I respond in real life by either that name or my SL name. I'm a student in college and I live in Salem. My real life identity is readily verified using OpenPGP, my key ID is 0x133BCBA8 with a fingerprint of 7F61 24A3 7931 63AC 1749 4C69 CBBD 36F3 133B CBA8. I'm a real life business owner who, back in February, was able to take a 70% cost increase in fuel in stride, but was not able to take last May's 210% cost increase in fuel.
I really think anybody who did not have a contingency plan for severe and unexpected cost overruns put themselves out of business with the Open space price increase; and I can't say I have that much sympathy.
In this day and age, you need to be prepared for your costs to at least double overnight without warning, or you're simply dooming yourself to failure. More-so if you're putting all your eggs in one basket, as I did with hauling hot shot freight; and as many here are doing by only running a business in SL.
Odds are if I had diversified so I wasn't exclusively working the highway, I'd still be in business despite last May's $2.38 to $5.00/gal in a week cost jump.
Does this make SL's rate increase on openspace sims any more fair? Not really, no. But that's business: Business is NOT fair, inherently.
Just as I was destined to fail over an unforseen increase in my cost, certainly more than a few will fail in this price increase.
Is it fair? Yes. Is it reasonable? Yes. Why? Business is cut-throat. If your suppliers do something unexpected, and you aren't diversified, you're stuck with what they give you. Smart business owners spread out over more than one industry, so if Idea A tanks, Idea B is still covering the business.
Why did I fail? I thought hot shot freight would always have demand. Turns out, during an economic downturn, luxuries such as ensuring things get there the same day are the first to go: I completely misidentified my market as a necessity instead of a luxury service.
SL business owners, I strongly recommend you do not make the same mistake I did. If Openspace's changes put that much of a burden on you, perhaps you should have diversified across multiple metaverses such as what coca-cola has done. Coke is in SL, There.com and many other metaverses.
Better yet, you can diversify to something that I couldn't: Instead of depending on real estate and vendors, SL creators can market their time. Instead of expecting no copy/no transfer to defend your business model, you can always just sell your time, and give the contractee the result full-perm. Time is often more valuable than the result; plus selling time instead of space or objects frees you from a lot of the headaches landlords and vendors go through. Diversify into selling your time as an SL developer and you might have more room to grow that isn't dependent on land.
You have the option of having multiple vehicles for your business. I just had a 1977 Dodge Tradesman box van that got 7 MPG highway. If you're only doing business in SL, you too have an albatross of a vehicle getting poor mileage with no fallback plan. Diversify or your business WILL die like mine did!
