time to sell secondlife and linden lab

after a year of observation, the conculsions i faced are pretty bad, due to the lack of capacity at Linden Lab to maintain a stable economy and a total disinterest in theyr customers, i suggest a group of players form an asociation and find an arrangement with Linden Lab to buy the society.
This will allow us to place more competents persons at it's direction and hope a more successfull business.

soo
how much is worth Linden Lab?

Linden lab is a private company at the moment I hear, so they can't be bought, except if you managed to sway the shareholders with a large cash offer (some millions, probably at least 8 figures).

If it were public we could get 51% of their shares, but it's not public, and if it did go public, hot air speculation about it's "potential" would probably make the price of the initial offering sky high...

maybe i think too simply, when your car is making noise, you replace the defective part

clear that there is LOTS of deffective part in LL

Tired of Second Life, are ya? Don't want anyone to play it any more? Because mark my words, if LL lose creative control over it's direction, regardless of how bad you think they are at it, it wont be Second Life any more. In fact, what will probably happen is that someone will swallow up LL for some part of the technology and shut down SL altogether. The likelihood of someone buying it up to continue Philips vision is miniscule.

I think SL is on the whole good, but maybe the problem with the L$ is that it got too big for it's boots. People started treating it as a real world currency, it got it's own stock exchange, people started swapping US dollars for it and visa versa...

Problem is LL don't hold any gold, so there's no backbone value to the L$, plus nobody really experienced is working to control it, and there's no real regulation over what happens to it.

Had it remained a small token thing in a game it would be fine. It was up to that job. But it was never suited to being an actual currency. It's like trying to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat.

do not misunderstand me, i think Second Lifeis a good concept, or i wouldnt be there

but sue to lack of technical skills, the sim software is a resource hog, the same "quality" is seen trough the client.
On LL's side, laybe they arent greedy after all but due to these resource hogging problems, the maintenance cost is high, the machines need to be much morepowerfull tan needed

add to this this kind of narrow vision of how SL should be compared to what SL really is

LL accumulate the bad moves and judgement errors and i feel its time more competent peoples take the lead

I think running Linden Labs is a tough challenge to meet. Many people complain about bugs taking ages and features taking ages to develop. How are they doing? I'd say where 0 is pathetic and 100 is flawless, they're probably about 65% in my estimation.

They take a while to release new features, but working in software myself, I'd say you really can't test something too much.

Building software takes N time. Building software and testing thoroughly takes N * 2 time. And building software, messing up, making the antidote (patch), testing and applying this takes N * 5 time.

So testing is preferable, really.

Vote Linden!

<rant>

My credentials (the boring part): I started developing in 1985 (Acccounting software on a ZX Spectrum). Since then I have done business apps in dBase, networking and comms in Pascal, database and comms in C++, have played with assembly on 3 different platforms, and done some on-the-side work in DHTML(JS & VBS), PHP and C++ CGI. I am a full-time professional developer employed by an international company that devlops software for both private industry and the military.

My statement: Programming is hard work. It is difficult to do, and even more difficult to do right. It takes years to learn how to do it properly, and them more years to build up real experience, just like any other professional occupation. Anyone can read an idiots guide to medicine and start diagnosing symptoms, but that doesn't make them a doctor. I can read a Haynes manual, but would you trust me to fix your car?
Devlopment, done correctly, takes an incredible amount of time and effort - gathering requirements designing and architecting, implementing, testing, fixing, re-testing, fixing more.

I think Linden Labs have release an awesome product. I've dreamed of putting together my own MMVW for years, but the sheer complexity of the task has held me back. Various open-source or collaborative groups have started their own - most have failed quietly.

I think LL are doing an awesome job, and I'm frankly surprised that they have the resolve to keep on at it day in and day out, against the torrent of criticism and abuse hurled at them.

There are many valid complaints, certainly. And many of the complainers are indeed people that have a true, deep understanding of what it takes to pull of something like SL. But the sheer number of people that think that being able to copy scripts from two different object into one qualifies them to make public, objective calls on LL's competence bugs the hell out of me.

Walk a day in their shoes, people.

</rant>

*edit for clarification* sorry, succulent, I realise this is not 100% on topic to your original post, and my rant is certainly not directed at you. this forum is just the straw that broke this camel's back.

knee-jerk reactionarism + lack of ability to spellcheck = fun way to kill your argument before you even start

Yay for making stuff up, and poorly spellchecked diatribes.

You'll have to literally pry the shares from philip's cold dead hands before you can get a controlling interest in the company.

Its net worth is probably several million dollars at the very least (its earning 3-4 million a year in revenues)

This isn't fantasy land, you can't buy a company with linden dollars.

LF

hey sorry i am not english, so itsnot always as accurate as it should be
i dont think its a valid argument to attack me

Great idea, really great! However since it is hard enough to get a group of 10 SL players together long enough to put a biggish house together, I fear there may be some practical coordination hurdles to overcome first.

And could you imagine the exponential amplification of the cries of FIC/favoritism if SL is literally player run? hehe

If I had 8 million I'd buy the company and all its staff and keep things going. I'd have more trains though! Lots of trains with steam engines as well.

Or I'll buy shares, I'm not fussy.

I'll buy this company for one... meelion... lindens!

Succulent,

Nobody's forcing you to play in SL... If you don't like it, leave it. If you want to buy, go to a corporate bank and have them approach the (very) rich stakeholders in LL.

The fact that you're venting in the forums is proof enough you have no idea what you're talking about in any case.

If I had 8 million dollars, I'd buy a nice car, a boat and lease a couple of really nice condos in places I liked. I would then buy a really nice computer and take flying lessons. Oh, I would also hire a couple of programming engineers to reverse engineer SL from Poland for a few grand a piece. I'd then hire a Romainian game company to modify it, improve it and package it for release. I would then set up servers around the world to alieviate ping delay and promote "Second World" as a truely international game, game time would be GMT. I would locate the headquarters somewhere in the world, probably India due to the number of high quality engineers and low cost.

Then again, if I ever got around to it. With my car, boat and condos and 6 or 7 million in the bank I probably wouldn't care.

lol LL and Benchmark wouldn't accept an offer price of $8M right now -- waaaaay too low.

Actually, the US doesn't back it's dollar to gold anymore either. So technically it's just as liquid and fallible and empty as the L$.

The only reason it has value at all is in commodities and that declaration the government made to pay it's own debts. Or something. I'm not entirely clear on this point -- I just know that there is nothing solid backing real-world currency anymore (in most countries).

Save some gold for me then! I'm a busy man. I've got a ten o clock in fort knox, then I'm in the jet, and then it's the bank of England's vaults to clear out UK currency

Seriously though US and UK currency ARE gold. That's why they're backed up by gold.

On a UK note it says "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds". That is telling. A ten pound note is actually a cheque from the bank of England for ten pounds of gold in the vaults in the basement. These days you can't actually go down there and ask for your tenner's worth, but that's how currency (real currency) works. So yep, the US dollar is backed to gold. Why else would we pass around bits of paper?

Curiosity: You can actually see as well, every bank note cheque, is signed by the chief cashier at the bank of England, so it really is like a cheque

Untrue, totally.

The United States dollar is entirely fiat currency nowadays.

Really, so I can go empty out the bank of England then, and fort knox? Mr. Bush is just holding some gold in there... For a mate. Over the weekend.

The USA went off the gold standard in 1971.

I think some confusion is arising between holding gold to put value behind a currency, and pegging the value of a currency to the current trading value of gold. The gold standard is about pegging the value to the current international value of gold. Few western currencies are on that anymore, but all currencies use gold as the kick behind the buck.

Put simply, if not for fort knox bullion reserves, what is a dollar worth? And don't say factories, cause one factory is worth... One factory.