Is LL the second IBM crash?

I was reading Mark "Im a politician and talk crap" Kingdons blog post about how the SL economy is all full of flowers and Second Life is the land of milk and honey and why all the businesses who took this feedback thing (and i dont know ANYONE who got one of those) are vastly in the majority of "Yes! We LOVE YOU Linden Labs!" group...and it made me think.

In the 80's IBM was THE company to do with computers, it was THEIR way or the high way, no one could touch them. Then 88 hit...smaller companies started appearing and nibbling away at IBM's foundations. Then 91 hit, the red tape of IBM and its beurocracy (sp) of stagnant old school executives started to get the bump, or seen the ship sinking and left of thier own accord. All the while their CEO was saying...well...the same things Kingdon is saying now..."everythign is FINE! Nothing is WRONG!"

IBM went from being the top of their tree to a virtual collapse in the space of 4 and a half years.

From my eyes...Linden Labs have just hit their own version of IBM's 1991...

What do you folks think?

I think....IF there were anything else even comparable to Second Life out there...I could make some kind of a comment.....but since there truly is not..........well.....I can't even speculate. While I do believe that yes...indeed it could happen......I don't think that it's something LL is worried about since there simply isn't another virtual venue like it.......yet.

Yep, there is no Macintosh or Microsoft around yet.

What they said. LL is definitely as clueless, incompetent and shortsided as any company could be, but they are the only viable provider of their product. It does say something about SL that it inspires such loyalty from customers who have been as badly treated as SL residents have.

Maybe we are all masochists?

If a competitor came on the market wihich is more stable and provides good customer service, would we see much loyalty. It's easy to have loyalty when you're the only cat in town.

Oh yeah? What about openSim? Ironically, something IBM is heavily involved with.

I don't see waves of people abandoning SL for Open Sim.......yet.

Sorry, but I think it's bleaker than all that. LL doesn't have competition because there's not enough demand to justify anybody getting into the market with a real competitive product.

It's an open question whether that demand is just waiting to happen (we're in the "pre-PC" era of 3D virtual worlds), or if (as I've come to suspect) this boom is over and LL will have its niche all to itself for the foreseeable future.

For a bunch of reasons, I don't see anything based on OpenSim becoming a serious competitor, even if demand were to pick up again. Its only commercial appeal is "land" at the cost of hosting, which might be viable if LL were to hike tier and fees dramatically--something they did for the OpenSpace market segment. But if an OpenSim-based grid were to offer better-than-LL customer service, that pricing advantage would erode. And other than price, it's just SL with leaky permissions and open source exploits built-in.

If the Linden Research board is losing sleep about future competition, they should be doing it because they're so very vulnerable to market entry by a real social networking giant like Facebook or Twitter. The SL Friends list and Groups functionality are so hopelessly limited--it's a much bigger risk than somebody just undercutting prices or having flashier graphics.

Indeed, if Orkut hadn't been stillborn, I think Google would have given Lively the user-generated content and graphics polish that it lacked, and SL would be history already.

We're talking as if SL has no competition. It has plenty.

It competes for my entertainment dollars and free time against a myriad of options, such as any social media/entertainment media and in many combinations. In my case, it competes with my other creative outlets such as writing, photography and design. Plus, it competes for (the vast majority of) my free time. LL does not understand who it competes with, at all. (If LL could develop an S-Light that didn't require hours each week to enjoy, you might see more people staying for longer than a few weeks.)

The poor stability, high costs, bad customer service and the ennui that develops in most players after a very short time, all contribute to the lack of customer retention, let alone satisfaction. If there is a loyal customer base, it is extremely small and still has a large dropout rate. I was a loyal customer but finally gave up hoping there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I enjoy reading the Forums much more than actually going into SL proper.

LL does NOT try to develop loyalty among its customers. Has anyone ever received a "Happy Rez Day" note from LL? Or a break in one's fees for staying for more than 3 years? Or any type of random act of corporate kindness directed at you, personally?

But waves of people do abandon SL for many other reasons. If Open Sim 2.0 or some other Virtual World shows up with even a parity product, the few remaining players will migrate to it and SL is burnt toast. (I believe it already is plain toast.)

Maybe LL would wisely sell some of the business, as IBM did, and focus on its core competency. If only LL knew what that was. It could also take a lesson from P&G and the value of individual brands within a corporate portfolio of brands.

I don't know about business surveys, but I quite often get pop-ups when I launch Second Life that are LL surveys. They ask if my experience is getting better or worse, or whether I would recommend SL to friends or business associates. The thing is, the surveys are broken -- I am unable to successfully click on them! I try to click, nothing works, but closing the window does work, thankfully.

They're probably counting me as a happy customer, since I didn't click on negative feedback...

I should say that have been happy with their responsiveness to finally cleaning up the Mainland after all these years. Parcel related ARs seem to be answered promptly and effectively for Premium and Concierge customers.

Regarding competition: Someone recently asked me what I thought was the future of Education In SL. As it happened, I was that day going to attend a lecture and discussion in SL: it's a professional series that a university educator puts on about his area of expertise several times each week. I notice that his materials now say that he's moving to another grid. I went over and checked it out. It's running the open source simulator, and it's some company that lets you hook your own sims onto their grid. It seems to be just like SL. Apparently, the Future Of Education is that people who are frustrated with Second Life are moving off of LL's service and onto competing private grids.

Why the negativity in the original post? As far as I know there are no virtual worlds that come near to doing what Second Life does. The closest ones are those legitimately 'cloned' from Second Life through the OpenSim project.

If a better virtual world comes along which provides a richer virtual experience than Second Life, then we're in trouble. But I see no evidence of that beyond occasional promotional videos that come to nothing.

As memory serves me, the fall of IBM was not quite that simple. First, there was the financial impact of the move from a lease to a purchase business model that was predicated by a Justice Department Consent Decree. This substantially disrupted the financial model. Second, the PC and distributed server platforms (HP, SUN, DEC) gave the customer base an alternative to centralized development for departmental apps, and IBM executives who were vested in the mainframe and I/T departments who did not understand client/server computing buried their heads in the sand and were left behind.
Ultimately, the decision was made that the company should be broken up...one could argue that this decision resulted in the hiring of LVG, a total outsider who saw that the strength of the company was it's ability to provide "one stop shopping", or "one neck to choke". Only the unprofitable businesses or the low growth ones (Printing Systems for example) were spun off, not any of the core businesses that have provided the rock solid foundation for IBM since 1990. I just don't see the comparison as being valid here...I'd be open to discussion, though. Jackie.

I guess I was trying to say that LL, like IBM, has many products within this brand called SL: A creative-building product, like virtual Legos. A social networking product. Role playing products. A Virtual Sex product. Virtual land development. Virtual dollhouse product. Etc

It could be chopped up into more manageable and focused bits, and promoted separately. The educational product seems to be leaving for the opengrid, which is too bad, since that holds the most promise, but probably least potential for making money.

One might wonder why another virtual world hasn't turned on its lights yet (even though there have been many threats). It can't be that the LL technology is so closely guarded that no one can emulate it. I do believe that the others have worked the numbers and simply see no profit in it.

And has IBM actually fallen? It may have tripped in the PC market, but as far as I know, it still exists and does quite well in certain product categories like large enterprise servers and software. No?

No, IBM has definitely not fallen! It was the only tech stock to hold or appreciate real value in the past 12 months, and is taking market share with incredibile rapidity. You probably missed the connection from my other forum posts, but I was there for a long career, including having to fire half my team in the late 80-90's period and retiring a few years ago to move on to a new career outside of IT. Of course, I retired very young The "new" IBM is in my opinion an outstanding model of an integrated services, reserarch, design and manufacturing business. LL is a niche player with a very focused product. IBM was a widely diversified player with a huge range of products, maintenance and consulting services, excellent customer support etc. in the subject period. Just that senior management refused to let it be what it really was. LVG catalyzed that transformation. You might guess that I'm a huge fan of Lou's. Jackie.

SL needs social networking to attract "normal" people. I don't mean blogging and memes and gimmicks and pictures. SL needs a way for like-minded people to find each other, and it needs interesting things for them to *do*. That's things to *do*, not just things to *see*.

I don't have faith that LL will be successful at social networking. Anything they do (and it's unclear that they even see a need to do anything) is likely to be too fair and democratic and automated, which means it will be gamed into uselessness.

I've built two substantial social networking projects to near completion only to put them on the shelf for lack of a way to make money from them. They'd help LL more than they'd help me. Not that I don't want to help them, but they don't put food on my table, so I can't afford the time.

The biggest problem with LL's business model is it relies on unpaid residents to create a useful experience for other residents. Unpaid people tend not to have the time or resources to do a good job, and they tend to give up.

You know something... I thought that was the big problem with OpenSim's business model, and why Second Life has no competition, because Second Life pays residents to create stuff, and OpenSim's boosters are always going on about how micro-economies suck.

OK, I know what you mean, and they really ought to bring back something like Dwell and the Reputation bonus or some similar social games to pay residents to create a good experience for residents... but without making them quite so easily gamed? But for Franklin's sake, what they have is still better than just about any other social networking tool in terms of paying the people who create a useful experience. I sure as hell don't get any money out of Twitter or Delicious or LinkedIn or Last.FM... and nobody's complaining that they're all about to die because they're depending on unpaid residents.

I didn't care for the personal rating thing when it was here. I refused to rate people and asked they didn't me when they said they wanted to. If it were something that one could choose not to participate in I wouldn't have a problem with it. I can see where some people would like it.

Second Life pays a *few* residents to create stuff. Most people don't make any money doing it, and most that do make only beer money. Last month was the first time I made tier, and you wouldn't believe the effort I put into my products.

I thought I might be able to leverage my social networking projects to earn more money creating content. It was how I was going to "get noticed" without spending a fortune on the classifieds money pit, but there are at least two problems with this approach:

1) I don't have time for both. I've been working full-time on this for two years, and it's still not enough. Trying to do both has prevented me from succeeding at either, and at this point I'm more likely to become homeless than I am to be successful at either.

2) Using the social networking project to advertise my content creation business makes it not impartial. This is why most SL projects fail. They exist to support someone's business, so they don't focus on the best of the best; they focus on what brings people to their own (or their buddies') business. I wanted to avoid this. I don't know how.

I typically doubled and even tripled my Basic stipend with rating bonuses just by being, well, me. I didn't have to do anything special. I guess some people did have to be more social and interesting than they would have otherwise, but that seems fair... that's the goal of the system, after all. Now that's not a lot of money, but you don't want to feed people a lot of money through the system... and that's where they screwed up. They should have capped it, and not all that high... maybe below the premium stipend... instead of letting people make real money by gaming the system.

Replacing the reputation bonus with camping chairs... and that's what they did, really, by killing it... seems like a poor trade-off.

That's what I get, but I spend it on avatars instead of beer. Ferrets and other critters are my drug of choice.
Sounds like you have too much land. I almost always make tier, and usually more than that, simply by never having more land than I can pay for. When my income went up, I bought land, when it went down, I sold.
That's the other thing I don't do. Spend more time on any of my projects than I have spare time. This is a hobby, not a job.
Quit thinking of it as a business?

That's the problem I'm trying to describe. If you put hobby-level effort into it, you get hobby-level results. So, most things in SL are mediocre. The best of the best isn't quite professional-grade. Unpaid people don't have the time to do better.

Only if they have a 16 year old kid write whole new server code and then get an exclusive licensing of that software. =D

I'll give you that part. I just see it as something else to be abused , as a way for people to gang up on someone they don't like, or artificially pump up their friends. Like I saidm if it were optional , fine. I can see it being useful, especially to newer players.

Well if so, I want some of the stock at the rock bottom prices that you could once get IBM stock for and then I want to sell it right before everything goes bust. No other current option in sight for recovering my retirement fund balance.