2009 could be a difficult year

It did not appear that the product they were describing was an isolated grid. It sounded like they were at most putting the region domain behind the firewall, leaving the agent domain, asset servers, and everything else connected to the public grid. Speaking as a former network security administrator, that ain't gonna fly.

Edit: I made the point in that thread that this was "too little too late". I can see OpenSim owning the "grid in a box" market, not the IBM hybrid solution.

Okey-doke.

Several people (for instance, Traverse, just a couple posts above this one) have suggested some very sensible directions for LL to go.

Yet they seem fixated on this 'business meetings' thing.

It's puzzling, and also frustrating, as they seem to take the position 'our users are unimportant and can be treated with breezy neglect...they're nothing but our de facto Beta testers. What's really going to put this company over the top is Business Meetings!!!'

And in making this their guiding philosophy, they are leaving profits on the table, and wasting resources on a non-starter.

So that's what I'm posting about--I'm not focused on the question of how many avatars can fit in a sim. It was one minor question among many.

A designer builds something in AutoCAD. You then get to demonstrate through camera fly throughs what the thing looks like. Maya also and you can go between AutoCAD & Maya. Now unless you can directly import complete builds from Maya or AutoCAD to and from SL, you are creating twice the work in designing something for a client and trying to show it to them in an "immersive" 3D environment.

IF SL is going to turn into a corporate demo platform then a lot things have to change about how stuff is built here and whether you can MOVE inventory (builds) freely back to your local desktop. I don't think SL has the scaling to do that. I don't think they even want to do that. I could be wrong.

Imagine the client saying -- gosh I like this but I'd like x, y & z changes. Do you make them in SL and the hope you can replicate it in AutoCAD later? Or do you do it in AutoCAD and then go directly to plans?? I'd say the latter.

I've heard from others that the things needed to get direct import and export of builds (which a company would be most interested in) along with the ability to edit those builds with the accuracy of an AutoCAD or other tool would be massive AND insanely slow. Plus, consider that for a lot of activities LIKE SL, bandwidth is increasingly being choked at the ISP level.

To me it's clear that Linden Labs hasn't decided what it wants SL to be when it grows up. Philip seems to have lost the vision thing along with respect for the people who built this place.

I agree with the general consensus on this thread.

When i first joined SL 2.5 years ago, i thought holding business meetings would be a do-able product...as time went by and seeing the general Grid instability and its limitations I no longer view it as a viable product for RL businesses.....not on a grand scale anyways. Education ... that's a different story altogether and they seem to be doing ok.