All Out by 2009?

I move to create a meeting planning committee to plan for the expected meeting.

(go)JIRAAAAAAAA!

No, no, no! You silly-billy

The idea is that the Premiums and land owners pay double to subsidise the freebies..
and then..on top of that .....
... freebies can only use a special client that pops up advertising at them

That's no big deal. The idea of paying a sub to get rid of delays or nag screens has been around 'forever'. The sky won't fall. Nobody's SL will be affected, except for the freebies.
That's where advertising belongs in SL - guaranteed popping up in the freebie client screen in front of eyeballs - not on some static billboard or spinning cube in a deserted sim where it will be seen by 10 people a year.


I'm just totally gobsmacked by this insane idea that we have to have *totally* freebies. We need a high-end gaming PC in order to run the client software. Those are far from free. If people with access to that sort of hardware won't pay a nominal few bucks a month, then let them eat adds.

Hey! Google is 'free'.
Are they making a massive loss?
Is my RL being ruined by ads in Google searches? Nope!!
Would I pay Google to stop putting ads in my search screens? Nope!!
Would I pay LL to stop putting ads in the viewer? Nope - because I'm already paying them lots.

I have heard that statement so many times at RL meetings in rooms full of people making 6 figures (and video+ audio conferenced), you'd be amazed.

You're joking, but I've been at meetings that were held for the sole purpose of planning meetings. Ever want to pound your head into the wall until you pass out? I wish I had.

Well I guess now that Philip is stepping to the side, much of this may be moot anyway.

The new person's remit will be handling the media and PR along with the rest of the value chain.

We'll just have to hold our breath and see what happens.

On the contrary, I think it's particularly germane now: the new CEO, whenever she's named, will have to deal with just these topics to spur growth, and will be acutely interested in any good ideas that surface here or anywhere.

I was that rogue. But I'm not sorry.

When I saw how many young people were spending way too much time in WOW at the expense of real life, school, career, etc., and then heard of Second Life, I thought that it might be a good option for the young game addicted, where they could play and make a income too. But honestly there are so many issues in SL, technical, legal, ethical, on so many levels, that that doesn't seem feasible to me anymore unless LL gets bought out by Blizzard or Microsoft or Apple or LL suddenly get's real, and it's redone right.

I just think that is the reality of the situation.

Almost all of our meetings had agenda items like-

"What happened last meeting"

and

"What happened at X,Y and Z meetings"

and

"When is the next meeting (they were all weekly which made this funniest)"

"what will be discussed next meeting"

"Who was going to carry this over to X,Y,Z meetings"

*THEN*

throughout the meeting you had to report on the status of the assignments you got the previous meeting,

and other people got assignments which they would have to report on the next meeting.


We would more time talking about other meetings then the meeting we were at.

LOL and I was dedicated to a specific project,

For many in the room they did this for 3 or 4 Projects. (meaning 3-4 times as many meetings)

I'm sure she will Qie, but you never know she might just walk in, put a call through to Gartner and tell them to shove their report up their *rse..

It sounds like she might get a white piece of paper, in which case strategies.. tactics .. markets and the whole caboodle might be up for review.

If she decides that business isn't needed and can show the investors where else their profit can come from , it might be what many people on this thread were looking for.

Whatever happens I'm sure we'll live through some interesting times.. although that used to be a curse didn't it..

Disneyland has a bunch of themed areas, designated for different things. That might be best for SL Having themed areas, might help with organizing the many interests people have and their various type of interests. Scripts and attachments could function in one area but not another. People could choose what area they wanted to live in, but could travel to other areas if they meet the age requirements and change areas if they pay for a transfer. It could also be done by servers, such as WOW has PvE servers, PvP servers, Rp servers, RPPvE, RPPvP. In Sl's case people could travel between servers.

Each themed area could have imaginative names.....naming those areas would be fun, since SL has so many different ideosyncratic things going on.

One major thing this could accomplish would be to segregate G rated business from the rest of 'fun" SL.

Interesting in a way we have been debating the nature and future of SL the day the CEO resigns

Gartner is influential and a lot of money is spent (or not spent) based upon their predictions. And perhaps it certain areas their research is spot on, but from what I've seen, when it comes to topics that are on the periphery of srs bizness, they are too often wildly off the mark.

From the quoted text, it sounds like they bought the line that SL is not a game. (Before I open that can of worms, I should probably state that while I don't think SL is a game in the same way that WoW is, the word "game" fits in more ways than not. Perhaps "entertainment" is a more accurate and neutral term...and most people play SL to be entertained.) I think they understand that it is a 3D communications medium, but jumped to the conclusion that it means it is a novel way to conduct business or sales meetings--something akin to Microsoft Outlook (albeit with sex beds and bling). They forget that sometimes people like to communicate socially, you know, like for fun.

In their first point they discuss how companies may not want to buy computers capable of running it (my own experience has been that a company will buy whatever equipment is needed if they want to do a project badly enough). They are predicting its demise because most office computers can't run it. Oh, and besides it doesn't meet a lot of big businesses' needs (yeah, and the Wii will never catch on because you can't get Excel for it.)

An online game or social platform doesn't fail because it isn't made for serious business. People don't go to movies because they are a great way to meet potential business contacts or conduct project meetings. They go to be entertained. Despite that, Hollywood still manages to do okay.

I think it's the other way around. This debate is pretty much an everyday thing here.

And just to add some implications ..

a)
Anyone using a lot of bots is presumably using them for commercial advantage. So if they are faced with paying for the privilege of using an arbitrary client they might like to revisit the spreadsheet.
Camping bots might take a dive. Landbots run by the more successful would probably pay their way.

b)
Griefers couldn't use free whack-a-mole accounts.
If they wanted to use a custom client to evade hardware-fingerprint banning then they would have to pay a sub for each account.

The sooner that freebie accounts are forced to use a LL client (even if with no advertising), the better.

This is a good point, your technical problems aside... forget about business laptops its completely foolish to expect wide spread business 3d use with todays hardware. Focus n the power PC user or gamer.. when I compare the fps of SL to other pc games its night and day. This afternoon I go from playing HL2, an older standard to be sure.. it looks and plays so much better than SL that when I log into SL and get 14 fps, textures grey and never loading or strange red colored, on my higher end machine its depressing.

What it means is that SL is not viable for a real immersive gaming experience, this is perhaps where things like SONY home will come into the forefront, by standardizing the hardware it can focus on the experience.

Other competitors may already have an edge over SL in terms of performance, in my opensim instalation I rock around at 90+ fps with 512 draw distance, granted there are less textures and scripts to slow it down but the difference is incredible (and this is alpha software).

(*note to earlier posted who was suggesting opensim is only local on your PC, you are very misinformed... with minimal installation and configuration you can host public grid quite easily, and the features are approaching SL's very quickly and in some areas far surpass it already).

Entropia universe is going to be amazing when they get the crysis engine going, talk about boosting hardware req's, lol.

Take this test, go inside somewhere in SL and walk right up to a wall so all you can see is one texture.. what fps should you expect? A few months ago in SL I could get 60-70fps, now its like 30.. Opensim will peak out for me at 120-130.

There is obviouslty something fundamentally wrong with the SL server code.. why else would it take so long for them to open source it? My guess, half of it is written in vb6 com+ etc..

By the end of 2009 will be serious crunch time for SLGartner is right, but maybe not for the right reasons..


-W

You know,I have been thinking and in addition to the community needing to stop complaining and instead start harassing LL 24/7 for them to fix everything, the community in SL seems to be missing a very important person:

COMMUNITY MANAGER

Almost all games have now at least one community manager. In addition to all of its other duties, the community manager participates regularly on the games forums and talks with the community,helps the community and so forth.

He quit ..

Thankfully.

Hmm
He quit?Thankfully?
Would you mind elaborating?

I think some wires are probably crossed here, regarding the Community Manager position. There was a Daniel Linden who once had a role something like that. (Not to be confused with Dan Linden, who is a very different person in a very different role.) LL recently hired someone for a new role, titled Community Manager. I would expect that new hire to be introduced in an Official Announcement, sometime after the wires cool down from the recent Official Announcement.

That was the one.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/31/keeping-second-life-safe-together/

There you go.

Kinda speaks for itself.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2642394922604088000&hl=en

Or this.

The problem is that many business including hi-tech industries will tend to by "business" hardware which typically doesn't include $300-400 video cards, and often just has onboard GPU chipsets (typically the Intel chipsets there are so many horror stories about in the SL tech forums). No business is going to take lightly upgrading the graphics of all its machines, particularly for software which has any reliabiliy issues (especially not in the current financial markets).

This may change with the increased hardware and graphics hardware demands but then Vista hasn't been adopted that well by industry yet (for the same reasons - cost of upgrading the hardware plus reliability concerns).

Then, of course, as has been mentioned, a lot of people now use laptops for business, and typically the criteria tends to be battery life rather than graphics power. Again the typical laptop would be using an Intel graphics chipset, and even the highend mobility chips from NVidia and ATI can often only manage 10-15FPS from SL at best (and that's without the new Windlight stuff).

Even my colleague who is looking after a number of educational projects in SL, had to get his laptop replaced, since the standard issue one did not run SL.

The is an active interest in the use of SL in education. Now (certainly in the UK), a typical student these days will have a laptop rather than a desktop (they are more convenient, you can take then to lectures, they cut down on luggage at the end of term etc.). They tend to be on strict budgets so often their choice is determined by whatever the weeks special <$800 offer is. Again, typically these machines come with Intel mobility chipsets.

Now these embedded chipsets are no slouches and can run 3D games quite adequately, just not meet the demands of SL, hence the view that SL needs to be "better" written to work adequately on such machines. On the other hand, if SL really does need much better hardware to run, then the realities of today's hardware means that it is just too soon for widescale adoption of SL in the business and educational sectors. That is a bit of a blow to LL though.




However, there are plenty of other ways of having a virtual meeting without travelling. After a few cancelled meetings due to downtime with less that 24 hours notice from LL, and the odd aborted meeting due to problems or unexpected downtime during a meeting, I can imagine many going back to the not particularly high tech but tried, trusted and reliable telephone conference!

But if you do want something more high tech - well you have skype, IM etc. Then there are video conferencing software like EVO - which allow text, audio and video messaging (via a MUD like room metaphor), and also (unlike secondlife) allow you to broadcast you desktop and even share applications so that multiple people can work on them.

Then there's QWAQ which allows you to share applications (such as Word, Excel) and have multiple people work on them in a 3D virtual office - this is based on OpenCroquet which is a peer2peer virtual world SDK which means you aren't relliant on servers or a grid being up and available, just that the participants PCs/laptops are.





Unfortunately, this is becoming the SL equivalent of the "boy who cried wolf" - there is always some competitor just about to emerge which will kill SL. Last year, it was Outback and Google Earth. Unfortunately, there will be a time, when there really will be a serious competitor - maybe not this year or 2009, but inevitably.

At present we have a number of platforms - IBM are hedging bets partnering with a number of them including SL and HiPiHi, indeed IBM have even built their own internal virtual world system based on the Torque Engine. Sun have Project Wonderland. Many Academic Sector are looking at (or using) OpenCroquet, there's Multiverse, ActiveWorlds etc. These many not be a challenge to SL at the moment, but their existence and the fact that their number is growing is a potential threat.

SL 5 year advantage is not that good when scrutinised - out of over 10M sign ups, how many of those have been retained? When you take out those who logged on out of curiousity, those who gave up not getting SL, those who got SL but hit one frustration (inventory loss, downtime, lag, payment problems, support problems, etc.) too many, alts and bots you don't really get a very large number of active users. Given we have about 60,000 avatars as a typical online figure (and a lot of those are bots or alts), it wouldn't surprise me if the number of real active users (by which I mean people not accounts) doesn't make 6 figures or at best is in the low 6 figures. That isn't a big lead in terms of user base, and don't forget a serious competitor would attract those who liked SL but left due to the problems with it.

The speed at which OpenSim is developing shows how fragile SL's technical lead is. True, OpenSim is nowhere near as functional as SL at the moment, but compared to where OpenSim was 12 months ago, it is moving pretty quickly, and that is despite it being primarily a volunteer effort. It seems pretty likely that OpenSim will catch up with SL in the next 12-24 months, and then we have efforts like realxtend showing how OpenSim could overtake SL!

Of course SL would still have the brand recognition - but examples like hoover show that can be a bitter consolation.

One issue LL has is that it has never fully grasped the nettle of whether SL is an entertainment/recreational platform (which is more encompassing than saying it is a game) or an business platform:

In terms of aspiration it clearly wants to be a business platform - hence secondlifegrid etc.

However, in business, reliability tends to take precedence over features. Scheduled downtime outside working hours is tolerated as a necessary (as long as it doesn't happen too often), unscheduled downtime is tolerated as inevitable (as long as it doesn't happen too often), and scheduled downtime during working hours is frowned upon. Any system whose reliability can't be measured above 99% uptime doesn't get much attention.

On the other hand, for entertainment systems the emphasis is on new shiny features, and reliability is still important but not as important. Downtime means disappointment at the time, but typically has no repercussions later (unlike a business system being down) and users are more tolerant about crashes etc.

As such SL is more tuned to an entertainment system than a business platform in its current development and reliability ethos (although it is probably pushing the users tolerance to the limits as regards reliability).

This can be seen by its usage - there aren't that many RL businesses regularly using SL to conduct their business. There are more that have viewed SL as an advertising/marketing medium with mixed success (and cynically, I would suspect many were more interested in the marketing value of the headline "xxx enters SL" in RL than what they actually did in SL).

There's a largish population from the academic sector - but then try out/research new things is precisely what Universities are meant to be there for, so that's not surprising. However, a colleague recently mentioned that a lot of Universities still haven't quite worked out what to do with their islands after building a bell tower!

But the main population of SL tends to be people using it for entertainment, now underpinned by a small industry of SL businesses underpinning that community.

Now whilst not concentrating on either business or entertainment may seem to be SL's strength (it is very laudable), it is also a weakness - it means they can be attacked on both sides. A direct competitor is not the only threat to SL - business only platforms (such as QWAQ), and entertainment only platforms are also threats.

Do I believe Gartner? Well in the sense that SL will face stiff competition sooner or later - yes; will that happen 2009, I'm not convinced, if pushed I would say 2010. However, an awful lot of businesses *will* believe Gartner, and as a business platform SL is weakest - maybe its time to declate SL an entertainment platform?

Matthew

Can you imagen how time consuming and brain draining it must me. One COMMUNITY MANAGER I remebered always fighting with everyone. Now is that a way to being a COMMUNITY together? No, what are you going to do? COMMUNITY MANAGER must understand the possibities that might occure without any personal feeling attached. But in the past that hasnt been the case. As I recall a Linden saying ( OMG "LAG" )That made me think how much they were lacking in basic computer understand. Don`t you think they should have had a decent graphic card? OMG they are a Linden for God sakes! Do they have any training in how to deal with dealing with people in social settings? Mosty no, why? well its who you know maybe? Or they had "MAYBE" one or two classes in university about envir social behavor...........
Anyone that had advance social behavor studies knows the how to(s)..........But the trick is bring toether the COMMUNITY in this VR and apply social into one Psy package. That said not on COMMUNITY MANAGER in resent times had done this.

Usagi

How do these reports about 2011 jibe with the arrival of The Singularity in 2012?