Linden Competition

Linden Competition? You mean like, Linden Assimilation.

Time and time again, I've seen their things come into view simply because a resident had created them... However.. LL takes the credit, the user quietly sinks back into memory, while LL reaps the benefits.

After all, its their software, they can do what they want with it. Why even bother to say LL is competing against its own residence? This is just absolutely insanity.

This thread is a joke.

I don't sell things or contribute concepts or ideas, simply because of this reason.

Duh, LL get a clue.

1. Well, to explain the last part there, providing the shopping sites IS a service. Like entertainment is content, shopping sites are goods, in a way.

So where does this line get drawn? At our houses? That's good, about our houses, but I took the "our world" thing to mean all KINDS of businesses. It doesn't mean much to me if they mean, "except for shopping services, public land sales, money exchanges, and whatever else we want."

This "fills the void" of something that "should have been in the client in the first place" is a slippery-slope argument I never did buy.

2 .As for the newbies, I think you really, really underestimate them. They were not born yesterday. They can tell - just like I could - simply by LOOKING at the shopping sites that they are trustworthy. Because if they weren't, those thousands of people wouldn't be using them!

3. Those "optional" things aren't really as optional as you might think. Because it is the government doing it, it becomes the official thing. And as someone said earlier, few want to participate in a business that the government is already doing.

4. I said - and you even quoted - "no 'small percentage fee' from me is required, unless I sell the object.

You are suggesting that we pay the Lindens to list our items, whether or not they sell.

5. As for setting up the shop in five minutes - and paying to do so - I'd rather take 15 minutes. (It's not five hours.) Believe me, taking that box and putting in in the vendor, then going to the site and writing up the description, is the least time-consuming thing of what I do. And I'd have to do the same thing for the Linden site - the only difference is I'd have to pay them first.

And yes, I do enjoy the variety of shopping sites, prefer NOT paying until my item sells, and enjoy using them and dealing with the different people who run them.

6. Vis a vis the carriage vs Model T analogy, I don't see that the Lindens WOULD do it so much better than those sites do.

So - oh well, we're not gonna agree. What's fun for you and what's fun for me are two different things, after all.

coco

They're not in the business of co-opting content, they are in the business of making content creation quick, easy, and profitable for their users. Currency exchange, while useful, isn't content creation. Neither are land sales or shopping services. They're middle-men that can, and have been, chopped out.




Well, actually, by definition, yes they were.




If thousands of people fall every year for Nigerian bank fraud schemes, even after being told on the news many times, and even though the emails are poorly written english and all caps, consider me skeptical on Joe Average's ability to reason between "fraud" and "good deal".



If the government is doing a horrible job, the free market kicks in (as long as there is a profit to be made). Look at animation overriders. So we get custom animations, but no way to really use them in the client. Enter some programmers who provide animation overriders via script.

BTW, LLab is a company, not the government. A company's job is to make money. A government's job is to provide for their citizens. When you look at it in that light, it makes a bit more sense.



Why not? We already do it for classified ads and to list our plots in the Places tab (currently $L30 a week). I was referring, however, to a percentage of the sale.



Except not. Imagine SLEX's fee structure embedded into the client. In one scenario, you pay Anshe. In another, you pay LLab. What's the problem here?



Fantastic. Do you also buy your money via IGE instead of the Lindex as well?



Except they have, via the Lindex. It's easy to access, painless, and has volumes that are currently outpacing the three largest currency exchangers combined pre-GOM-shutdown.

Whereas it took someone 15 minutes to find a working GOM ATM, someone now clicks the $L button, enters their amount, and et voila, instant gratification.



I guess.

And for all that work, you get nicely detailed webpages that market your product to your potential customers.

I can do fifty items a couple of hours without breaking a sweat. Don't want to wait for the box to boot? Drop it inworld right before logging off for night. Don't want to wait for the items to update? Drop 'em on the box and go grab a bite to eat. It's all about working in paralell.


Yet, on SL alone, hundreds of people seem to manage and hundreds more to buy. It's not noticeably worse than eBay or ABE, yet hundreds of thousands manage to buy and sell each day.


And with so little work, you get no pictures, no descriptions, nothing to attract and hold the customers eye. A simple little one or two line entry (and uncategorized to boot!) - really attractive from a customers point of view. (I.E. the object descriptions available now are not even up to 'bare bones'.)

By the time you get a Linden-run site able to be even remotely as attractive (to the customer) as a SLEX entry - you've added back the time consuming parts like entering data, uploading pictures, selecting categories from menus, etc...


That's not entirely clear once you compare apples to apples. SLEX is quite user friendly to the seller, and extremely user friendly to the customer. (And it's the customer who counts after all.)

Because people lack the ability to use software discretely, or as I like to say: people have no imaginations. The idea of Linden Lab doing both confounds people to the extent that, to reconcile the idea, they have to interpret "add new feature to existing paradigm" into "smash old, new good!" just to sleep at night.

Have you ever read Flatland? It's like that.

So the introduction of any new feature automatically necessitates the removal of an existing feature? That's insane Jarod. I see what you mean though. Perhaps I shouldn't think so badly of people who are just being normal after all.

They are only human, after all.

I think Moopf said it best. The residents are SL's greatest strength, and LL should, whenever possible make the tools better to make the resident products better.

Lordfly's complaints are valid; what I'd like to see if a folder under "My Inventory" called "For Sale" (or something akin to that) where you can put objects you've created you wish to sell. These would be available publically to anyone to sell from the web with your permission, and you wouldn't need to keep that bloody prim rez'd in world. Coco's right too; there's something about resident run ventures that are charming. When I thought of GOM, I imagined two hard working guys in a basement somewhere, start-up style, with a checkbook in one hand and a keyboard in the other. That was how my first company got started!

Regards,

-Flip

Did anyone ever figure out the original poster's intended topic of discussion for this thread?

I think she was just trolling

I think she was trying to explain that LL, while not actively looking to ruin people's businesses, sometimes does that in the process of internal development.

Don't you mean, so as not to have sentence 1 contradict sentence 2, cap the existing Mainland sims, and focus on selling estates?

(And if you meant otherwise, why should the servers not be co-located? It doesn't make sense to have to support my own machine, either from LL's or my own economic standpoint.)

At the same time, to switch to a 99% rental based land system is probably a bad idea as far as the internal dynamics of SL society go. So definitely these servers should be able to support internal land sales. But then the problem of trust comes up. I trust LL not to pull "eminent domain" type of tricks on me (at least so far), but I don't trust Joe Estate Owner that much.

There's no reason not to keep the mainland going as long as the tier pricing is set properly to create balanced incentives, such that the advantages of small parcel ownership also allow LL to make money. Maybe a separate tier system for estates and for mainland ownership.

You definitely have some interesting ideas Khamon, but I almost always find myself in a kind of orthogonal position with you. (as in, I sort of agree but there's something kind of off at a wrong angle) There's some sort of thing going on where you're nearly absolutely right, except that we're in a world of human beings who live to interact with each other more than anything else.

As Jarod said, after all, they're only human. But I think the "only" is a matter of perspective.

The most I could glean from the OP, was they are glossing over not practicing what they preach when it comes to resident run business.

I interpret it as this.

Build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Then LL will co-opt your business and collect the money, while dismissing it as a "new feature"

Your business is not safe, by any means.

LL has it's eye on other businesses too.....don't kid yourselves. Web based sales and rentals are among them.

How did I miss this thread?

Your World - YOUR Imagination?

i don't know where in "your world, your imagination" it states that players get to keep monopoly on what they are doing.

LL acknowledges players IP. that doesn't mean that the idea itself is protected. sometimes it is - Tringo is obviously an original idea. a currency exchange is obviously not an original idea. buying public land and selling it at a huge profit is obviously an exploit.

change or die.

Yes, by "LL estates" I meant the Linden Estate we commonly call "the mainland."

I don't know Joe; but comparing LL's trust record with that of known estate owners, I find others much more likely to say what they mean and do what they say.

Conversley, there's no reason to keep the mainland growing if it's costing them money and preventing them from showing profitability. I tell a lie; there is the reason of persuing the dream of one happy virtual world. And Philip is perfectly free to keep propping that dream up with his money if that what he chooses to do.

Your confusion probably stems from mine. Try as we might to figure out what LL are doing so that we can argue their points supportively, it's like chasing a greased piglet. How do you know what to think is happening with so many conflicting ideas and promises mixed with a plethora of wholly contradictory actions?

Jarod has no proof that they're all human and he knows better than to make that assumption. He's just trying to fit in.