And the pull out begins....

the problem with current cooperate presence in SL is the fact that they all are super megaloid companies

Coca Cola who is that, maby i will check them out, OMFG there are ppl in 3rd world countries who have never seen a computer, or maby even a post 1980 car, that can tell a coke from a pepsi blindfolded any freakin day of the week, who the hell cares about coke island, its sugar and soda water we all Fkin know get over it, if were gonna buy a coke were just gonna buy it, we dont need advertising like is the newest thing to hit the market

IBM? PLAYBOY? same thing

i laugh at established compines trying to ram yet more advertising down my throat for the same ol shit, keep pissing that money away....

Didn't Coca Cola just say they're not going to do anything to enforce their trademark in SL as long as it's not a coca cola penis... or similar? That's why they're better than Pepsi.

I cant see a Corporate Exodus as being all that bad.

To come here thinking you'll entice us into buying your product? Nah.

To come here to promote the product, with an understanding of how SL works, maybe.

Movie Promos seem to do well. I see alot of Transformer avatars around.

It's a matter of knowing "the market". If you're pushing some new movie, cartoon, or anything that translates into "SL Culture" then you might have a chance.

I have a strange feeling these companies pulling out came here thinking "Lets make a quick buck & pull in some new consumers".

Exactly, theres no need for that. it`s not like we are all REALLY avatars stuck in a virtual world with no clue of the first life or these companies anyway.

We know who they are, we experience them tangibly in first life, it was just stupid.

I spend my money on their stuff in RL, I don`t need it here.

I'm betting that several of the half-assed corporate presences in secondlife are the result of:

Some random employee at corporation X who wanted to play with their own sim and convinced some marketing droid with signature authority to pay for the ride.

Heck, if I thought my evil corporate overlords would go for it, I'd try to talk them into fronting the cost of a private sim for me to tout their brand'n'such.

im not a fan of corporate islands, but having them ditch the grid isnt exactly a good thing for sl. and i reckon these 'greedy companies' were probably promised the moon by ll. i think there is a place for a forward thinking company in sl though. the most obvious void one could fill would be escrow.

I think it has far more to do with the way the mainstream press gave every corporation that threw up a shingle in Second Life so much coverage - so much unrealistic, glowing, "next big thing" hype to be more precise. The first few who came in got a hell of a bargain getting their SL presence trumpeted far and wide, and everyone else who came afterwards expected that same almost-free advertising bonanza, but they haven't gotten it. The novelty didn't last, and the press burned itself out hyping SL and switched to the opposite extreme, as if they're severely bipolar and out of medication. I doubt any of the well known SL development houses have had to go out and beat the pavement, knock on doors, and talk corporations into an SL presence with some kind of hard sell. It's far more likely that after the wave of hype the phones just started ringing. I suspect things will be a bit tougher for them from here on.

Speaking as a resident, I have had almost ZERO contact with any corporations in SL. I visited the IBM sims once... to see what they were doing, and apart from thinking the builds were fairly ok, I looked around for about ten minutes and then left, realising they were not aiming their pitch at me... but at their own employees... and left, never to return.

I have seen a few coke machines, and cans here and there, but since i don't need a coke in SL they didn't attract me. I knew that various other corporations were around by reading about them on forums etc, but since they weren't offering me anything directly that i wanted, they just didn't make an impact.

Why would I, as a resident, be interested in them? They didn't offer me anything or talk to me.. they missed the point as far as i was concerned.

I won't miss them because they were never in my frame... The only thing that concerned me was the way LL seemed to court them and value them. I am not even sure if that is a true perception of LL's attitutude...

/me shrugs ..

imogen

They weren't promised anything by LL. They came in when it used to be good for a spiffy press release. Now that the only press a company gets is negative when they come into LL, they have stopped coming in.

So the corporate 'gold rush' is over. Great!!! The few who actually have a use for their presence in SL will stay. The others who wanted a cheap promotions excercise in cyberspace will soon be a source of cut-price second-hand sims. IBM and Intel look like they're in for the long haul and make an effort to be involved with the community in SL... IBM's sponsorship of the Second Life Ballet and Intel's sponsorship of Second Fest come to mind.

What Chip said.
What Imogen said.


X million residents and Anse F.... Chung's RL $million were pasted wall to wall. It was something the media could relate to.
The result was interest from corporations and parasites (not equating the two - have sense!).

As for LL and corporations:
Look at what's happening in Corsica. Sims are being dropped an the auction block as fast as possible without dropping the usual price of a sim all the way down to US$1250.
The current land area in Corsica is only a third of the final map.

Even a few hundred corporate sims are only a drop in the ocean compared to the mass of mainland and non-corporate islands.

I honestly don't care if corporations are in SL or not. The place is simply to big for them to have any impact. There is no ubiquitous in-world media for them to control.
I find that they have near-zero impact on my SL.


I suspect that it's a case of LL using the big corporations to indirectly promote SL to end users, rather than the corporations using SL for anything that matters.

What? Sex items are not the only thing sold here... there are lots of cool and fascinating things to do without the darn RL companies coming in. Dunno where you've been shopping...

IBM is just investigating the potential - purely as a research project. However IBM is not putting all its eggs into one basket, it is also experimenting with other virtual worlds including an in house one built using the Torque Game Engine (http://eightbar.co.uk/2007/05/08/the-ibm-innovate-quick-internal-metaverse-project/)

SL is suffering from the classic example of the hype curve peaking and falling before the technology curve. Java was another good example - hyped as write one/run anywhere revolutionising the world, many jumped on the bandwagon (there was even a beta version of a java based office suite based on WordPerfect) but then jumped off when they discovered Java 1.0 was slow and memory hungry. Java surived, however, and Java2 addressed most, if not all. of the performance issues but it took it a long time to shake off that slow/memory hungry image.

The hype peak hasn't been helped by LL's opening up the grid to free accounts and promoting the headline x million figure and the "SL as a platform". When the companies come to SL they dicover both of these are PR hyperbole. When you remove bots, alts, and people who have left SL for whatever reason, the number of active distinct users is a frraction of the headline figure with only 40,000 online at any one time, and worse only about 30-50 can be in the same sim before the sim grinds to a halt; and it is too unstable and unreliable to be a platform and apart from some fairly limited HTTP functions in the scripting language no pluggable architectures to link with your existing systems (e.g. can you link it seamlessly with a corporates internal VOIP system - not easily).

Whilst the hype crash can kill technologies, technologie can and do survive the hype crash (Java being a good example). Time will tell which one SL falls into.

Matthew

So someone is grumpy because he/she can't make big money and play videogames at the same time? Aaawww.....

Considering that I am currently building a project for a rl company, I would say that rumors of SL's demise have been greatly exaggerated! That, or they don't read enough news. lol

Well I welcome the corporations here, they should be encouraged to engage with the residents though, rather than go into isolation. They should be advertising at malls, giving us exclusive previews of products and generally interacting with the world that exists.

Anyway, corps are still coming here.

the main issue i see if the big companys start pulling out, is LL will try cleaning the grid up even more then they already are... i'm sure some of the companys will say they left because SL is nothing more then a sexfest and guess where that will lead.

The thing is that the RL companies are not providing the "content" that people want in SL. People don't want to buy a virtual coke. Many people want things that they can't get in RL, or access to experiences they might not have in RL -- like flying a helicopter, engaging in combat, creating a beautiful environment, wearing edgy/unrealistic fashion, etc. There are places in SL that are constantly packed that are not "sex fests" -- look at Phat Cats or the Apollo sim or the Valentine sim or what have you. There's plenty of content in SL that attracts people. The RL corps coming in, however, seem to want to bring their RL content into SL, and in my view there aren't *all* that many people in SL who are that interested in that particular content.

well i believe ll probably did schmooze the corporates. i would be willing to bet the remaining 50% of my land value that ll have a corporate sales team.
but other than that single point i agree.

I like some corporate places:

I like the Ben and Jerrys island. Its built to look cartoony.

The Nissan Altima car that the Nissan sims give out free is a high quality car with excellent scripting. (I would estimate its worth over 1000 L$ when I compare it to cars people sell)

There is a flower company sponsering teaching events which I think is good.

Apart from those, corporate islands havnt effected me one way or the other.
I dont know why some people resent them. Its not as if they show any major presence. Possibly its because people feel the Lindens give them more favour than the majority of people who actually feed SL with money.

The amount of land (and hence money flowing into SL) that corporations own is tiny compared to residents, so I doubt if many leave it will harm SL much.
It will of course harm those companies that charge RL companies a fortune to build their sim for them. But the loss of those sim building companies doesnt matter either.

The NBA sim was really nice and impressive. I just could not figure out where to get the BBall Hud so I could shoot hoops, so it was worthless.

Ive been to the scion SIM and was very impressed with the builds look.

Been to playboy and was beyond disgusted and shocked at the result of the build and content being offered there.

Other than those 3 I have no idea what the island names of other "coporate places" of interest are. Then again, im not too interested.


Above posted mentions ben and jerrys, i`ll have to check that out I like cartoony sims, dont see much of them.

We come to SL to get away from so-called real-life! The last thing that interests me in SL is corporations advertising RL goods or services.

If the RL corporations actually 'get' Second Life and adopt a role within it, that's fine - e.g. Toyota making quite convincing replicas of their cars, which would be great if driving was easier in SL. But those who just use it for publicity would be better off enhancing their normal RL website.

Touche.

/me waves.."Bye, Bye. Thanks for stopping by".

Good riddance.

I don't see how a corp could come to SL, set up a sim and not draw people and make money. Unless whom ever set it up didn't have a clue; and from what I have read that is the case.
Hell even an uneducated farm boy like myself could set up a corp sim in SL to draw a crowd and make a bit O Ls.