M. Linden Just Opened Mouth Insert Foot

Now M. Linden says: Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business."

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/11/mark-kingdon-on.html

I have been a premium subscriber for 2 years now. I pay quarterly and was thinking of changing it to yearly. Now, FACED with the possibilty of giving up my OS and THEN be told that my hard earned RL subscription and tier money for my mainland property is immaterial.

Where did they get this guy?

Well that is unbelievable. So why have they been expanding the mainland If premium members are immaterial, then this land will either just be linden parkland or will be empty.

Only premium members can buy land (or is this about to change??)

M Linden, you aren't doing yourself any favours are you?

You're alienating the residents who make SL what it is.

cause they have this shiney new advertisment and content generation firm thats going to replace the current community with clones that will act and do everything LL wants with out question.

Not much good in this financial climate though.

advertising budgets are being cut drastically, and new forms of advertsing (sl for example) are going to be the ones that get dropped first!

Hmm. LL apparently either mean that they only need a couple of mainland barons to hold all the mainland and rent it out, or that they only want companies who can shell out for entire islands in SL.
With his rather hard-nosed statement earlier that landowners had "until January 2009 to adjust themselves to the new rates", while Jack was promising to listen to the feedback, he seems either out of touch, or tipping his hand while letting his underlings put on a show of good faith. Neither really wins him any brownie points.

Edited just to note that M also claims that the amount of openspaces is "not a number we publish", after Jack has published the numbers.

been there... just another opensim that _might_ arrive at a point of usability and level of content comparable to sl in maybe 4-5 years.

LL really needs a moral PR person, team, ...dictionary.

If you're talking about to Big Spaceship, at least they won't create content inworld.

Personally, I don't see replacement of community.

At first I thought he was talking about the 100s of thousands of dollars in tier fees people pay for mainland every year and I was pretty outraged. But I suppose if he's just talking about the $10 a month subscription fee that some people pay then it's obvious that it is irrelevant. They've basically made it pointless to pay since most people now rent on estates and with the stipend the income from it must be very close to 0.

With LL controlling the L$ supply, the stipend does not cost any money to them. But compared to tier fees, the premium account charge indeed pales in significance. My bet is on LL getting rid of Premium accounts altogether and moving to a purely land (or rather: tier) based charging model.

I hope the rightful person replaces M. Linden soon. This is getting ridiculous.

Lucky for me, I don't use a Premium account. Basic is better.

"M" is the wrong person to be leading Linden Lab. Period.

For all his faults, at least Philip believed in his product. All M seems to be interested in is making money and squeezing us for all he can - and I bet he's on a huge salary too.

Unfortunately, it won't be griefers, or technical issues, or even competition that will be the end of Second Life. It'll be management incompetence - something we've seen a great deal of over the last year, and will continue to see.

Commercially the move makes sense. Looking at it purely business-wise, LL is selling infrastructure packaged in three different products: Mainland, full-prim islands and Openspace islands. Nobody outside of LL knows the respective profit margins, but I guess from previous LL communication it is safe to say that for OS it is much lower than for the others.

So the business decision is clear and, from a short-term P&L perspective, the right one.

What LL has failed to factor into the equation is that for many people SL is much more than a video game. Dreams, plans and emotions come into play. Thus the anger and violent backlash from the community.

I fear that the loss in goodwill, repercussions through RL word of mouth and a decrease in enthusiasm on the side of SL evangelists is larger than anticipated and may even outweigh what the product line streamlining does to the corporate bottom line.

As other stated before repeatedly, if this were really a technical instead of a commercial problem, other measures would have been more appropriate than a massive price hike for one of LL's product lines.

Well in a sense it does because it reduces the amount of L$ that Supply Linden can sell without flooding the market. LL make a huge amount of money from selling L$ and giving it away to premium accounts is devaluing the L$ to a small degree. Note, I'm not for removing stipends or anything crazy, jus' saying.

How does "Supply Linden" compare with resident to resident sales? I thought the basis of the Lindex was that residents buy from one another. And LL does take a cut of that.

Supply Linden simply "mints new coins" as the situation warrants, to control inflation, keeping the exchange rate stable and offset the L$ sinks built into the system.

-This combination of a steady stream of new coins (from Supply Linden, which people pay for directly, or other sources like prizes and stipends) and sinks into which the old one simply vaporizes never to be seen again gives LL an amazingly accurate way of controlling the value.

ETA: On the Lindex, Supply Linden is effectively just another seller, using the same tools and way of selling, but with the twist that he/she/it can freely mint the coins sold, and has a quite different purpose in putting them up for sale.