Why SL cannot succeed - a personal opinion.

Sorry but..............
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Still this is not solved?

LL isn't behind on tech. Making mistakes, yes, but if you've never made a mistake you never tried anything. SL over the 2+ years I've been here has gotten better technologically. Some backslides, yes, but over all, an improvement.

My main cry is, and always has been, that LL lacked proper management, and directive. Again, as of late, I've seen a small, but significant change from LL. I do believe that the visionaries are seeing that they need a bit of footing to go forward. Wether they can achive that on their own, or will need outside sourcing is something to discover. Personally, I believe most of LL is too idealistic to behave as true buisness people. That's not a slam, just an observation. Not everyone is good at everything. LL is good at inovation and ideas.

SL not secceeding.....No, I don't see that. For LL to fail would mean for them to basically give up and walk away. Part of the core of LL being visionaries, also means that they do not understand "give up". Their outlook is "there must be a way". It may not be the "way" we would percieve, but they will find a way.

So I think LL will ~continue~ to succeed. How well they succeed remains to be seen.

~Jessy

Everyone has heard of Walt Disney but most have not heard of his brother, Roy. That is pretty amazing when you consider that Roy co-founded the Walt Disney Company and served as it's CEO for 42 years. The reason is because Walt was the visionary. He was the idea man. He was the dreamer. Roy, however, had the less glamorous job of actually running a company. Without Roy we would likely never have heard of Walt.

Linden Lab has their Walts and they've shown us the great things they can do. Now is time for them to get some Roys to run the operation.

Like I implied I was going for subtle.

Heres the 2x4 response I should have given.


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You give no supportable example of "bad business decisions"
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The often derided "instability" as a bad business decision is a mischaracterization.

Please name the other 3D streaming virtual worlds with 50,000 people online at once to compare the results.

The MMOs dont count - Because they don't have 50,000 on their version of a "grid" they have large numbers of "Servers" (grids) instead.

The fact is Linden Labs has had to try to maintain and improve stability during a period that saw a hundred-fold increase in concurrency.

Its basically simple minded to point at that level of a problem and claim its due to a bad business decision.

The Voice feature was subcontracted.

The Windlight feature was a product of a company they acquired.

The famous Phil L "Now were going to focus on stability" comments are just corporate PR. He wasn't saying stability wasn't a concern before that, not really.

The "lack of employees" problem is hard to gauge without seeing their budget. Considering that American business has been pushing for skeleton crews for *years* now, the fact that LL has one hardly makes it unique in a business sense.

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Other issues
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*Customer service - Online companies generally have poor customer service. Have a large staff of people to answer the phones really isn't part of their business plan. Plus we haven't seen their balance sheet to know who they can afford.

Yeah - the customer service is spotty at best. But we don't know that the decision to provide what they do was a bad one, or just a compromise they had to make.

*Banning Gambling, Banking - They have legal consul for these decisions. The gambling ban had to be made to continue to be paid by US credit cards (a no-brainer) The Banking ban was necessary because fraud was rampant.

*Verification, banning Age Play, being less Porn friendly - You can blame those ones on the Media. Linden Labs were pushed into those decisions.



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I am often the one complaining about LL's policies , sure -

But when you say business decisions are going to be what ran them out of business, we really need to know they had all the options we seem to think they do.

SL has to have bugs, when it becomes bug free it means it has stopped evolving, which means it's dying.
Sure there are people here who think they would be happier running version 1.0 and it's C64 graphics and engine, some because it means their old products don't need to be updated or replaced by new versions. Or some just want to watch their sales figures, the don't want to look at fantastic works by other residents using SL's latest feature.

IMO the reliability of SL has improved. Not too long after I joined the grid went down at least once per week due to some griefing exploit, and also went down for regular maintenance. And things ground to a halt with 20,000 users online. It seems to be better now, even with 30,000 bots joining us online

If I had to take an uninformed but observant stab at LL's biggest source of technical trouble I'd say it was focus. I'm guessing individuals have too much freedom at the Lab, and that nobody is made responsible for fixing anything but the most important of problems. I like to use search as an example. I think someone thought the new search would be a cool new buzzword-compliant, resume-padding project, and once it's "done" they'll move on to something else. The aim was to work on something cool, not to solve a problem. Once they've learned that making it work is more a social challenge than a technical one, they'll move on to the next cool thing, leaving seach in a broken state. That may have already happened.

I think the challenge to LL is not technical but social, and that's unfortunate since they don't seem to want to take a social role. I don't think they'll even offer technical fixes if doing so would force them to take a social stand. Ad farms, anyone?

In my year-and-a-third here I've seen the number of accounts swell while at the same time the grid has become more and more a lonely place. Attracting and retaining *people* is a social challenge, not a technical one.

I highly recommend listening to the recent podcasts LL have put out. They clearly explain what they are doing to improve stability and the vision they have for the business for 2008. It turns out for the last year they've been working on the Havok and Mono projects which are both being implemented to improve stability.

When I signed up in late 2006 it was commonplace for me to have big issues in SL everytime I played. These days it's mostly Sunday nights and when they do upgrades. In the last year LL have had to deal with massive growth and some rather serious legal questions and they've come through it without going under.

We are at the front of a new technology/social networking wave. Who knows where it will be 5 years from now but I for one am enjoying being a part of it.

If there is a general issue with SL I think it's that it's platformized itself way too soon.

When SL was first created, there were quite a lot of changes made to the model as a whole - the introduction of tier, etc - which represented SL adapting to the market it needed to operate in, and to the need to operate as a business. But now SL has charged into the whole idea of being a virtual content platform with nobody having knowing if this will work. But the problem is, if it turns out not to, SL couldn't adapt again. If it was actually found that SL's existing business model was broken, it couldn't adapt, because there's way too many stakeholders to organize.

That's the big fear. That tomorrow, somebody really and truly proves that SL's business model is irretrievably broken and a spiral into decline is inevitable unless it starts to focus on the overall net experience of L$-buying customers in the same way traditional MMORPGs do. But then, the Lindens can't change things and thus betray the people who've bought into the existing model, so... what can they do but watch it die?

(I'm guessing that the Voice improvements are because somebody on the board's pointed out that Voice has been a bad business idea, as it's cost LL money to implement but hasn't added that much to the popularity of the grid.)

The can`t get either right "technical or social". Why because the people have for the social roles ( mind you not all are 3 brain cells from the bottom. )They are so out of touch, its the letting the preschool kids have techers roles. Uncontrolable social factors from these leaders in those laughable leadership roles. I spend most of my playing life supporting and helping, never would i think about talking bad about those that i supported for a long time. But they made this way because they just didnt care about those that gave 95% of their play time on sl to support and help new and old users on sl. Bitter well a little hateful no, because those that are incharge just don`t give a ******* if you having problems with people within a group that supposely is a social support group for LLABS. ANd they just turn their back on you. Well then I say those incharge of the LLABS social groups Mentors, Greeters, LH are just fooling themselves they can do they job they are paid to do.
Then again those linden just change AVIR names to give off they are newly hired lindens.....Its just laugh joke these days.

The general issue with SL is that it's fugly.

So you agree that they should hire me then Ciaran?

Only half-joking.

You mean SL has Costomer service?.................1/3 joking here

I think this is spot on. You're describing the effects of this "Tao" style of managing they're so proud of. That kind of approach surely only works (if at all) with small set ups where everyone can see and understand all aspects of the business, with extremely good feedback between groups/departments, and with everyone's minds firmly fixed on the same goal. It seems to me SL has grown way past the point where letting everyone pick and choose their own focus can possibly work.

If you have a large number of people weaving a very large tapestry, all only being able to see their own patch, SOMEONE has to be making sure that there's an overall design being adhered to, and the boring (but necessary) background parts get completed on time. SL quite often feels to me as if it's being patched up ad hoc long the way, instead of being woven with a controlled design in mind.

Perhaps that's simply how pioneering works and some other less idealistic but more focussed company will reap the rewards of the experimentation?

IMO, the fact remains - both big business and individual 'players' need SL (or any equivalent) to be stable and relatively easy to use or it goes nowhere, so development also needs to keep that as a priority.

--
Aes

Exactly!

I think part of the "SL Sucks" mentality comes from folks who think "Gee! My PC from 1996 should run ALL modern software!! How dare advancements in technology tell me how to live!!"

Yea... Just like Vacuum Tubes, B&W TV, TV Antennas, and Ma Bell are still 'en vogue'.

It'd probably help LL if they didnt live in an expensive area. I know part of it is "location", but if I was gonna try to do it, I'd pick a less expensive area of operations other than San Fransisco.

I think you need to rethink what you think

Though the need for a gold computer doesn't exactly help SL spread into poorer areas, does it?

The requirement for a high-end user machine v. the apparent resistance to paying even a minuscule membership fee always struck me as very odd. Or as some might put it - "bonkers".

Yep. Couldn't agree more on that score.

I think it comes from the fact that SL relies on streaming data and yet is struggling to deliver that data. You could have the most powerful computer on the planet and yet SL's mainland would still suck. The problem is on LL's side, not the end-users.

Vacuum Tubes are still in wide use. They're big ones called CRTs.

I do have a B&W TV still, one of those little ones that used to seem such an amazing deal, small but so cheap. It's in the closet on a shelf, not too far from the Atari 800 it used to be hooked to.

I'm still calling the phone company Bell even though it's AT&T now. I still call my bank by the name it had two owner's before.

I wish I still had some of the old tube equipment my dad owned. Sigh, folks don't have histories any more.

Let's all face it,,,,. Don't expect any significant improvements in SL performance any where in the near future!

Evidently they either don't have the hardware and/or the knowledge to properly stabilize Second Life. I guess we should all accept the current levels as normal operating standards. And if they do happen to figure it out,,,,, we'll all be estatic!!!!

Hi,

I popped into the forums looking for something else, and ended up reading this thread instead.

I appreciate all the opinions put forward here, and obviously many of the issues resonate with me to varying degrees.

While I can't readily sneak into the boardroom or the development teams of LL, I'd just like to put my two penneth.

SL is as we speak not making profit. It previously attracted investors on the wave of a large and expensive PR campaign which has now pretty much run its course.

The business is currently financed by investors, and investors are normally looking for an exit strategy.

They don't share the dream, the cause, the world view.. whatever you want to call it. They invested some money in the expectation that it would be returned at some point in the future with the addition of some interest.

At the moment those investors are probably getting a little nervous, because despite the introduction of free/anonymous accounts, the real tally of actual unique RL users is at best static. Investors normally subscribe to the idea that unique Real Life users = money; and unfortunately SL is proving rather bad at attracting either.

Thus LL is also getting nervous, they have to find a new strategy which will get people interested in SL again. A strategy which will attract real, serious users with real, serious money.

SL cannot survive as a platform if it simply acts as a support mechanism for alternative lifestyles and virtual artisans. It needs to attract mainstream users, with mainstream money.

This means an enhanced functionality, and unfortunately an enhanced functionality means additional cost, stretched resources and a less than robust product.

As I say, just my two penneth.

Just one more thing, the entry barriers to this market are not prohibitive. The technology is pretty much buyable off the shelf as is the technical expertise to support it.

The reason there are no new entrants to this market, is simply because there is still no proven profitable market to enter.

We won't see new entrants to this niche until SL start showing that there is money to be made, or somebody comes up with a different model.

Thanks for listening

Hey, Stephen - welcome to the forums!

Discussions down this road in the past have always revealed two things: 1) there is money to be made 2) but not for traditional money makers. The big guns of RL are not going to make money in SL - there just is no profitable market for advertisers or RL product providers like Nike or Charmin.

For a "provider" the only two revenue sources for a company like LL are land/fees and subscriptions. The explosive growth SL went through in 2006 was driven by both media exposure AND free accounts (as much as many hate to admit that.)

Subscription fees are where the money is and there is a lot of argument about free long-term accounts as opposed to a free 30 or 60 day trial. So far, LL has been unwilling to return to paid accounts for some reason. There are a lot of business decisions that we peons don't understand because we're not sitting in the corner offices but it does feel like things are shaking loose up there with both Havok 4 and Mono finally in beta.

Thank you for posting Stephen.

That last part reminded me a lot of search engines. Two of the 3 big search engines (MSN and Yahoo!) didn't enter the field until the 3rd of the 3 (Google) showed them how to make money from a search engine. Google's results were impressive as compared with the other major engines (all of which have now virtually faded away) and they captured most of the market, but that didn't persuade MSN and Y! to come up with their own engines. It was only when Google introduced AdWords and AdSense, and started making huge amounts of money, that the other 2 followed suit.

The posts in this thread show that different people have different expectations from SL. Some are happy to 'play' in the environment and, for them, SL is already successful, even though it will always remain quite a small place to play in. Personally, I envisage so much more, and it's not just my imagination. I'm sure we all remember a high-up at IBM saying that this type of system is the future of the internet. Also, unless I'm mistaken, I've read something from LL about the system being open so that other grids can interface, etc.

It's that sort of future that I see, and it's with that in mind that I wrote the first post in this thread. This type of system can be, and probably will be, the future of the internet, and the web will fade into history. It's obviously not just around the corner, but I'm sure it will come. That's the success that I say that LL are currently incapable of achieveing, simply because they don't yet have the right brains there.

I see hosting companies as grid owners who host sims and/or plots - the equivalent of websites - the World Wide World (www)