If you could ask M Linden a question or say something to him...

Don't knock lifetime employment.

I would start by saying that I'm a happy Second Lifer and in general I think LL is doing a good job.

My question would be whether LL could do more to guard against malicious or mistaken ARs that can, in the worst situations, result in innocent people being banned.

At the moment we have the situation where it's possible for a 9-year old child to join SL, play about with the functions, click on the first avatar they see and send an under-age AR.

M Linden rezzed near me on a art build I was installing, he'd come to see the one I'd just returned to the previous artist, he apologised for interrupting me and I apologised that he'd missed what he wanted to see and I ended the conversation by say "Good luck with Second Life", I'm sure we went away wondering why he needed good luck

Dear M,

Why do I feel that you won't be happy until you achieve this goal for SL?

I also fear that this will be in voice, which means there's no reason for me to attend; although it no longer crashes for me, I can't hear anything other than an unintelligible mix of pops and gurgles, and certainly couldn't speak.

I wonder just how unrepresentative will be the views, given a voice-only sampling. Surely there won't be much representation from the "voice is b0rked and not worth fixing" camp. My sense is that, more generally, voice users are more often Kool-Aid drinkers, too.

But I don't think I've yet been to an *office hour* where voice was used. The hokey "brownbags" have been voice since at least the Adult Content travesty, but are there also regular office hours held in voice?

If I am able to attend, I'd be inclined to follow Ponsonby's advice: "we don't want M to just turn off his mind ("oh, the usual abuse..."---we want him to CHANGE his thinking. And it's only if we succeed in both intriguing him, and in convincing him that his OWN interest lies in changing, that we will make any headway."

This is exactly right. A gripe session may convey that some individual attendees are displeased about something, which generates a rapidly fading blip, at best. In contrast, an idea presented as an opportunity or as a solution to a challenge--that's likely to expand in his memory, especially if it connects to other objectives we may not even know.

Right now, my main focus at M's level is on transparency of LL's management process, particularly as it relates to initiatives and projects. I'm still not sure how to best present that. And I'm really not trying to get them to air their dirty project management laundry in public. It's just that it's always been difficult to plan around the uncertainties in what and when LL will deliver features, products, and pricing; the current Viewer 2.0 is that taken to an absurd extreme: "We won't tell you what's in it, we won't tell you when it will be released, and everything you thought would be done by now won't be available until that unspecified date, if then... but you'll love it, trust us." Meanwhile the open source viewer developers are working on some branch of unknown distance from all future official releases, and LL has been cagey about when (or even if) the 2.0 source will be opened.

Dear M,

What IS your actual goal for SL and who has become real your target customer?


Yeah, I know I was supposed to only have one question, but this one has been floating around since LL started courting corporations and new users, without doing much for existing.

It's my thread and I say you can have as many questions as you want.

/me pictures Meade at the office hours, looking at a sheet saying, "Oh, this is another one from Raudf..."

This is an important topic to bring to M's attention.

I feel safe in guessing that LL has lost, literally, hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenues they would otherwise have received, because of the way (to give one example) the Openspace changes were handled.

Perhaps millions of dollars.

I wasn't directly involved in any of this, but it was clear that people who had made what they thought a reasonable investment, of thousands of dollars for purchase of islands and of thousands of dollars of tier each month, felt defrauded by the way the change was implemented. So they stopped buying and stopped paying tier.

And this was largely due to the famed LL lack of transparency.

Sure, the changes in pricing and in permitted uses would have made some people angry in any case, but it was the perception that LL had suckered people into spending a lot and then cynically changed the rules abruptly, midstream, that led to so many withdrawing the payments they might otherwise still be making today.

As you say, Qui, the attitude LL has been operating under seems to be 'why should we need to tell them anything? why would it matter to us that they want to be able to plan ahead?'

And this attitude has cost them profits. Possibly millions of dollars of profits, foregone.

In all seriousness I would ask him:

Do you care one iota about what your customers think about SL in its current state and beyond? When will you actually listen instead of patronizing them with disingenuous platitudes?

There is a lot of noise on this forum, yes. Some people just like to complain and nit pick, or like to rattle cages for entertainment purposes. *raises hand* But also, this forum is home to some of SL's most ardent supporters, peole who are getting the most out of SL, contributing to it in untold ways, and investing a lot of money as well as emotion into it. They complain too, but the do so because they have embraced the ideals and principles that SL was started on and LL has seemingly abandoned.

They should be listened to, and LL should rise to the challenge of filtering out the noise, no matter how much effort it takes.That is what those people are doing...CHALLENGING LL to make SL something that can affect the world, instead of just becoming a run of the mill internet cash cow that will never be relevant to the masses LL so desperately wants.

Will they rise to they chalenge? Past history is not in their favor. They have always shown that they prefer the easy way out, preferring laziness and ineptitude to hard work.

A followup question would be: Once your plan comes crashing to earth, the people you are pimping to don't come, and enough of your current customers finally get fed up and leave, what is the contingency plan scribbled on your whiteboards? Will it be cut and run, every Linden for themselves as a Gordon Gekko comes in and makes LL his Blue Star Airlines?

Brenda, you should go to this meeting.

I want more land.I want more prims.I want it now.I want it cheaper. Thank you.

I refuse to attend any public gathering that would admit me.

Would you like fries with that?