Who is ginsu and what's up with this post?

I mentioned this, in comment 66 (someone's got deleted - I used to be 67). They still haven't "gotten it" and the fruits of their 70+% resources being shifted to stability isn't wholly evident.

I tend to agree.

I've been doing some thinking about Ginsu's Blog post. It might be a bellweather of things to come.

I've been predicting that LL's dismal performance and arrogant contempt for us, the customers, will start to change around the time a viable competitor comes on the horizon. I'm not aware of any right now, although Jay's post gives me some hope.

I also predicted that LL's FIRST response will be PR puff pieces and some verbal [i.e. talk not action] ass kissing of customers. This may be a weak first effort at that.

I further predict, that they will not actually bestir themselves to do ANYTHING concrete or productive until the money starts draining noticeably. I don't think we're there yet.

Things that will get their attention would be a continued drop in premium memberships and a stagnation of the land market. By stagnation, I mean not necessarily a drop in tier payments to them, but a trend away from people buying more land, be it the big, multi sim owner, the mid range land owner [e.g. me with half a sim] and the smaller parcel owners.

Panic will hit when the large and mid sized parcel owners start selling off en masse and even abandoning land. Once the panic hits, you will see a veritable BEEHIVE of activity at LL fixing bugs, crowing about every bug fixed, outreach programs to ACTUALLY find out what is making customers leave, etc.

It is possible that they are starting to see the handwriting on the wall here. Naturally, their first impulse will be to it PR it enough to make the problem go away.

Sooz

Strangely enough, my own company is going to have a "branding awareness seminar" this friday, wherein we talk about what we are as a company, what our product represents, etc etc.

I was one of the privileged few who got to assemble the 3-ring binders for this shindig (okay, I volunteered to get away from my cubicle) and part of the book shows how our customers see us, and how we see us. You know what was scary? We saw ourselves as being 84% effective on customer service, feedback, training, etc. Our customers see us as less than 50% effective on these things. THERE'S a big wake up call. I instantly thought "oooh LL should do one of these things..."

What this means to me is that we're either a) not actually hearing our customers, in that somewhere the responses are being lost, b) whoever is in charge of tracking customer response is not doing his job, or c) there is no one in charge of tracking customer response. Interesting....

If someone came out with TODAY, a virtual world that was equal to Second Life in early 2005 -

People would abandon SL in droves.

Oh no they wouldn't!

Phil himself would post on the blog : “Thanks for having too much integrity for nine millions residents”

And everybody would burst into tears and stay with SL

Just a curiousity: did the folks who measured these give any interpretation? On its face, this doesn't seem blatently incompatible as the customer base desires are to have everything for nothing, which any real firm has to fall short of.

Back to the topic at hand, I think LL extremely unlikely to do this as it would make them feel bad and then they couldn't send as many lovegrams to each other.

I'm not sure, Mal, I didn't read the whole booklet, just sort of saw those numbers flash out at me. I'm sure I'll learn aaaaaallllll about it at our wonderful seminar on friday. I just hope they feed us.

The "customer satisfaction" survey that LL sent out a month or so ago (the one that appeared on the login screen) was worse than useless. That survey should have read: "If you could change one thing about Second Life, what would it be?" and then give concrete radio button choices, oh, I dunno, like "A better Search engine, Better Tech Support, Lower Tier Fees, More Stable Grid" etc. To give us a yes/no choice, then 80 characters to describe our decision was lame. Who's going to actually read 50,000 + responses?

They must almost willfully avoid collecting data about their own performance. Ever filed a support ticket? Now, ever gotten asked to rate the quality and timeliness of the support you received on that ticket? It's so standard, they must have either gone out of their way to find the one automated system that doesn't have it, or purposely lobotomized the thing so they'd not have to face the data.

And they could win by have such surveys even if the data went straight to the bit-bucket: at least it would give customers the *illusion* that their opinions mattered and that the company was trying to be responsive. (See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect .)

To be brutally fair about the WoW universe (although, I am also very content and happy with my blizzard service and performance experience) They've had their share of technical nightmares and customer service SNAFUs

Examples:

Release(Holiday 2004)- they *severely* underestimated demand resulting in incredible queues to log in, massive world wide lag, and the emergency release of an additional 30 or so servers that they hadn't planned on bringing online for another 6 months. They had to hire literally hundreds of customer service reps that they had not planned on bringing in so early just to keep up with basic tickets. Initial population estimates underestimated the actual initial user base by thousands. It was so bad that 4 months after release they ran out of boxes across the nation leading to wait lists and price gouging. (I started playing in the price gouging period. bleh at trying to find 2 boxes anywhere in the city.)

Winter 2005-Fall 2006 - Those servers continued to not match the increase in demand leading to months of many many servers having 2+hour queues to log in (I can't imagine how SL players would handle staring at a "Position in Queue 1,537 Estimated Wait: 2hrs" screen.) in addition- with the massive load on the servers stability was shot to hell. Servers crashed 3-4 times a week (some servers per DAY) during prime time and they had to install a new authentication server to deal with log in demands- at it's worst, you could wait in the authentication server queue for 15-20min and THEN in the server queue for hours. It was a PR and tech nightmare. It took them over 6 months to move all the servers onto new hardware and increase simultaneous log ins on each server with queues- during those 6 months they'd take entire chunks of servers offline for 3+ days (sometimes they didn't finish as fast as expected- especially at the beginning) stranding thousands of users unable to log into the game and play on their home server. It took 2 or 3 of these blackouts to get each chunk of servers over onto the new hardware.

All that said, the work they did in 2006 did miracles for stability and the current expansion (released this last Feb) went incredibly smoothly which went a long way to reassuring people that they had finally gotten control of the monster that WoW became.

... right up until they did the conversion to add Voice and software sound- which broke broke so many sound related things they had to release an emergency mini patch last week to get folks back to semi-normal.

WoW's done a LOT of things right... but it has had it's share of issues. That said, I'm playing WoW in the other window right now- not SL. =P

Surveys are on the horizon. More information, maybe on the login screen is on the horizon. They're looking at ways to collect more information from us. I know some of you are saying you've heard it all before but from the discussions I've attended they do seem to be heading in the direction of actually implementing something this time.

Whether that changes anything is a different matter entirely.

For some reason Im reminded of..... "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with BS."

This is one of the most destructive management practices I've heard of in a LONG time. Bonuses should be tied to achievement. Very often your highest achievers are not the most popular employees ... and 'love points', if they actually are as administered as said here, are nothing but a measure of popularity.

Most employees will interpret this mechanism as a disincentive to ever give any bad news, or criticize anything done by another employee. But ... people make mistakes, and if mistakes are going to be corrected, they first have to be surfaced.

Benchmark's portfolio, like that of all VC firms, is paved with the dry husks of companies whose management was in denial. "Love points" will lead to institutionalized denial.

Love points?

Not wanting to hear bad news?

Work on what YOU see as most needed?


Yep

Hippy Dippy Trippy all right.


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Baby Ill be there to lend a hand, baby Ill be there to share the land ..

Too true. Does this mean if they got a personable, attractive receptionist that he'd get all the bonuses?

However, this could be used to an advantage if Phil had the requisite cojones: store the love points on the asset server and use Find to help generate the reports. We might actually see an increase in reliability.

Love Points. sorta like what the In World ratings were before they were thankfully scrapped.

Well one little moan about WoW is that when you get to the higher levels you have to be very careful about acquiring various equipment because the bind on equip/bind on acquire system means if you try it out and it does not produce the required result (Crit spell etc) it can be an expensive mistake in gold and/or effort-time.

For example I have trinklets called Lifestone and Timbermall. Am mulling over a new one via a quest (Regal Protectorate) but if I equip it I cannot use one of the two others in tandem.

The armoury database could be enhanced to give you the option to "equip" an item before you buy/quest to enable you to see if it is worthwhile.

In SL when we buy something we do know what we are getting.

But in fairness a minor point

Colette Meiji has rated you positively.

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Coming to the kum bai ya rally later hun? Were gonna buy the world a Coke.

...but not necessarily if you are going to get it, what with the asset server and all.

But you really don't know what you are getting anyway. Go buy a vendor's box with a lovely picture of plants on it. Until you have purchased the box and unpacked it, you have only the merchant's "word" that the picture accurately reflects the contents. For good merchants that is true. From an unscrupulous merchant you could get a box of plywood cubes named "plant 1", "big plant 2", etc.

heard it before.
if robin needs feedback she can refer to open letter.
i dont understand the hold she has over you mate.
well, maybe i do

Absolutely! Raises over Love Points any day. Hell, I don't care, give a stellar employee a dinner out at a nice restaurant instead of a Love Point. This is so incredibly asinine. Can you imagine the Mining Industry giving out LOVE POINTS? The Defense Industry giving out LOVE POINTS? Wall Street giving out LOVE POINTS? Dude, the world runs on money, not love. If my company gave away love points, I wonder how many people would sit behind their desks jerking each other off and sending love points. Bleh.

Sounds like a good day at the office to me...

Only if you work in the porn industry.

Truth be known, I do. My pron name: Granite Terra.

Oh, I love your work......

Ty. Sadly though I'm limited to +4/-4.