Are individual SL businesses fungible?

I am hearing that it's not a joke. But STILL. I'm going to wait until tomorrow before I decide what I think about this. Possibly even Monday. LL loves their April Fools jokes.

eww. fungus.


Anyways!

You know what happens if I don't pay my cell phone bill? I get cut off.

This was not an April Fool's joke. Yes, she is back but her account was not even showing up on Find last night so she had not been banned, rather, her account had been either suspended or cancelled. I'm not absolutely certain but I think a suspended account will still show up on Find whereas a cancelled account definately will not.

I'm pretty sure once you've paid your bill your account will be back to normal.

You know...

I don't know of many services that will let you bounce a cheque for 5 Grand and then still use their services. Of course, most reputable business people don't -let- themselves be caught without enough funds in their accounts to cover the expenses they incur, and when they do, they accept that they may be inconvienced because of their own error.

I'd understand if LL had given Anshe a bit of leeway they wouldn't give your average person, but I also understand they don't have to.

I'm sure the second it's all topped up, her access will be back. I'm sure that won't stop the screaming though.

hehe...well I usually don't think of that term beyond it's application to futures and other highly standardized financial instruments, but I think I get the gist of what you're meaning.

I would suspect, as relates to your question about whether LL views it's business clients as essentially identical and interchangeble clients, that from a policy and process implementation standpoint that they do. Also, I would suspect that if LL raises the question "What will them impact be to the business owners" at all when they are contemplating a change, that more often than not it would be in reference to business owners as a whole, not AVATAR-CO Ltd in specific. I suspect they have just enough faith in market economics to believe that (and rightfully so IMHO) someone or someones will always move in to fill the gap left by those that close up shop IF there is a profit to be made in that specific market. So in that respect I would say yes, I think they consider individual SL businesses fungible.

I would however suspect that, like most service companies, they have a healthy respect for the business they get from their high dollar clients. That probably translates into a bit more increased access to LL staff than most customers get. Emails probably get read more quickly by some on the LL staff. Stuff like that.

Ok...now my brain hurts...too much thinking too soon after waking up.....

Negative. I dodged that bullet when I declined the spider's offer to visit her lair.

ever had a second date, though?



i have low willpower.

Ewwwww!

coco

I never offered you...umm... nvm. *blushes and scampers off to resume weaving*

Good question, Enabran. Not being a Linden, I can't answer a yes or no, but of course that won't stop me from throwing in my .02 Lindens on the subject.

For most businesses, I believe we are fungible. (teehee.. okay, got that out of the way.) If a top designer, builder or scripter goes the way of the do-do, there will be others to step in and fill that tier of the heirarchy. They may already have the skill, talent and creativity to do it. The brand would no doubt be missed, along with whatever made it so prominent, but trends will shift toward what's available. When it comes to businesses like Anshe's, well.. I don't think it's quite that easy.

SL is still a blind gamble to run a business in. Moreso even than a RL business, which is enough of a gamble in itself, but which has RL laws to protect our investments, and grace periods to run in the red. There probably aren't many people willing to make the kind of monetary investment it would take to run an empire of that size on such a transient platform, and with the kind of ToS SL requires us to agree to. Shutting down such a whale would hurt LL's bottom line.. in the short term. In the long term, it would be benefitial to the bottom line, provided that enough residents step up to fill that gap. That would mean less tier discount, less group land discount, and therefore more money for LL.

That's how I see it realistically. Ideally, I hope that we're all subject to the same terms and conditions. I hope that anyone else would have their account frozen the same way I would if I didn't pay my bills. I would like to think that we're all equal in LL's eyes, and that we're all subject to the same hard and fast rules. (Which are few and far between for LL, but pay-to-play certainly seems to be one of the few.) That's the ideal, but I certainly wouldn't be starting any crusades if that turned out not to be the case. (There would be enough of those without mine.) LL is a business, with overhead and payroll and everything else that comes along with that. If LL doesn't make those costs, and a profit to boot, we're all out of a job, because they'd shut down.

Miraculous. Thank you for an awesome response. This thread was fucking languishing.



That much seems expected, yes. I can think of no content engine within SL that has anything approaching the ability to foul up the economy or Linden Lab's bottom line via exiting the market.



This is an important point. Anshe provides a, perhaps unexpectedly, crucial lubcricant for long-term adoption of SL, as Anshe is in the business of providing a sense of home and permanence for otherwise insubstantial, digital people. If only for the dissonance of thousands of customers losing their "homes," Anshe's departure could be very, very unpleasant for Linden Lab.



This part of your post is what's most resonant to me. I absolutely agree -- the loss of Anshe would, in the short term, create a small nightmare for Linden Lab. Pissed off customers, diminished cashflow and god knows what other complications up to and including a massive devaluation of the currency exchange rate as Anshe (either maliciously or pragmatically) dumps her reserve L$.

Now, you qualify the good news that you predict for the long term with a decently big "if:" the question of whether or not there will be enough other residents to fill the gap.

I absolutely have to believe there will be more than enough. The size of that gap will be enormous. An enormous hole filled with demand. So long as demand exists, there will indeed be adventurous spirits willing to go make a buck. With Anshe out of the way, in fact, competition will be even more fierce, as each little guy does everything he can to differentiate between himself and the other little guys.

Now, given the wildly unprofessional characters that are obviously driving the grid's biggest economic engine, I can't see any way that the economy, residents at large, and Linden Lab in particular would not benefit from LL's taking this rabid horse out behind the barn. I keep hearing the words "shot across the bow" used to describe the banning. Let's hope it's not the last. This is a resilient, growing market that will absorb the loss and come out much stronger in the end. Hopefully Linden Lab gets that.



That much does deserve repeating. Whatever they need to do to keep in business, they can and should do. Hopefully that doesn't leave us suffering for the next few years with one obnoxious person demanding public apologies from Philip Linden, though.

This made me consider another point. How many renters would step up to buy their own land if their rented land were suddenly gone, or back on auction? They've made homes for themselves on this land, gotten to know their neighbors, created landmarks, etc... Would they simply find another plot to rent and start over, or would this be the jading they need to spend the cash required to tier up and purchase their own plots?

Having never rented land, I don't know how a renter would react, and of course it would depend on their financial ability and commitment to SL whether they tiered up, but it seems like a potentially profitable move on LL's part.

Profitable, yes, but it could also look exceedingly predatory. You gotta wonder if they would balk at such a move because of perception alone.

That did cross my mind, as a matter of fact.

I don't believe they would do it for that reason, but I bet it would come up in their thinking as to why they should take action if action was warranted. A lot of people make the claim that certain 'stakeholders' get to make the rules because of the amount of money they hand over every month.. but I'm willing to bet that some of LL's shrewder financial minds have considered what would happen if those whales were gone, and it probably doesn't equate to as big a factor as most would think.

My first thought around the Anshe thread was what about her renters. How would LL handle 30 sims worth of homeless people. My conclusion was who the fuk knows. 11M funding can change your outlook substantially.

I am NOT fungable btw! Just so you know.

Well, first of all you would have had to have been with someone else for them to complain!

Oh yes you are. I've seen photos. I'd totally fung you.

Some might go to premium and tier up, others would rent elsewhere and still others may leave SL altogether. It would depend on the individual.


Psychohistory anyone?

That depends on whether LL even provided a mechanism for people on Islands to buy them with all content intact.

Heh.. I was thinking about this thread on thed rive home and came up with an idea.

Get your Tinfoil Caps out for this one.

What if the suspension of this person was nudged by the $11Mil investment?

This Person pushed LL, and the investor said 'Push Back.' And the sudden delinquency was just the exscuse needed.

because.. (drum roll)

The Investor (be it an individual, or the owner of the investing company) has played SL and was burned by The Person who was Suspended.

Hehe

I'll lay out my presuppositions first because there is so much he-said-they-won't-say regarding today's event. The account was suspended; it was not a joke. The account was in arrears, but was also reported as having significant payments pending from LL to the player. The player is the single largest source of revenue for LL. These are suppositions from all the available information I have seen; I cannot assert they are true.

If the above are correct, LL is doing themselves (and by extension us) a grave disservice if they are not treating their single largest customer with special attention. Indeed, if I were the single largest customer of any firm, I would expect to have the phone number of the head of that firm such that I could reach him at any hour I felt I needed to. This is certainly not unprecedented in business and is a sign of a firm that understands where there priority is; put another way, if a firm feels that it is not beholden to its customers generally and its largest customer specifically they have likely lost their orientation.

Am I saying that the largest customer should be able to dictate what the firm does? Absolutely not. Am I saying the firm needs to listen to the largest customer no matter how absurd the customer may be? Nope, the firm can choose to not do business with the customer if they become vexatious enough. What I am saying is that what looks like a billing or payment issue caused the lockout of the largest customer who incidentally is a sub-lessor to myriad other customers. The threads we saw today look like the actions of a large customer who doesn't have the access needed to address trivial errors of grave consequence. Presumably, someone saw fit to re-enable the suspended account only after the inter-business laundry was aired publically.

As I watched this debacle unfold, I found myself wondering what would happen if the customer found that their enterprises simply weren't worth the aggravation; I think we certainly saw an aggrieved customer today. So the player exercises the right to stop playing and stop paying; what would be the implications for all the sub-lessees, for Linden Lab? Would there be collateral upheaval in the rest of the player base? I think the repurcussions would have been huge, all over a simple billing error.

This is probably not the best way to operate from just about anyone's perspective and if I were in the player's shoes I'd be giving serious consideration to divesting myself so that this didn't happen again, or at least establishing better communications so that I didn't find myself having to go public with what ought have been remedied swiftly and privately. If I were the head of the firm, I'd probably also be interested in establishing better communication with that customer as well. From the viewpoint a relatively disinterested party, this looked like a disaster narrowly averted.

Well the thing is, if you've got a big dick, they tell you - if it's small they tell their friends

$5,000 is not a 'simple billing error', it is a major error on the part of the user who created the problem for themselves.

What would be the implications? There are probably 100 people sitting on the sidelines with the capital, the desire, better plans and better customer skills - but know the futility of taking on such a big player.

My guess is that things would be volatile for a month - then it would all settle down, and SL would be all the better for it.

It's the "Walmart method" - be big and eliminate the competition, whereas healthy competition is good for the business and the customers who then have a choice. It gives users more options, and makes the businesses work better so that they can offer a better service than the others rather than simply sitting back, knowing they're large, and not actually caring about the individual.

The issue should never have even been made public. On other game forums that I post on, talking about suspensions/bans/warnings is a big "no no" and I'm really quite surprised that they aren't here too. Whilst by the admission of the user in question the fault was clearly their own, going public about thier lack of organisational skills to have the money in the right place at the right time, and not having sufficient cash in their account as a buffer zone to cover the purchases which they knew they were going to be paying, gives rise to one of two solutions:

a) They actually don't have as much money as they claim, and accounting errors meant they went over budget

or b) They are so overstretched in time, money, manpower and capability, that their limit was exceeded - meaning they are too big to handle their current amount of work.

Either way, neither are admissions of a sound business or good practice. Notice that there has also been no explanation as to "what LL did wrong", which tends me to lean towards that they were not at fault.

Lewis

I think in this scenario, a lot of anger from those displaced/inconvenienced would be directed at LL. How that would manifest, I'm not sure. For some it may be the last straw, others may simply grumble then rent somewhere else or buy land. Probably mostly the latter.
However, is anyone fungible (great word) in SL, even their biggest customer? I think so in the long term, one person's demise would be another's opportunity. There's already plenty of players in the land market, people would step into the breach.
It's certainly a cautionary tale. LL has just driven home exactly how risky an investment SL is. People may be reflecting on how wise it is to have a large stake in something so volatile. I suspect however, the lure of potential profits will trump all. Doing business in Iraq is very very risky, yet people do, because they see dollar signs.
I think it's like sticking your fist in a bucket of water... once you pull it out it's as if it was never there.