GOM Question re: LL Competition - Important Issue!

Definitely - however, in any partnership there is always a senior and junior party.

LL can live without GOM.

GOM without SL can't.

Guess who that makes the senior partner, and who calls the shots?

It's just that LL don't appear to be going about this in a pleasant manner. In fact one could be excused for thinking they are behaving arrogantly... Touch of Micro$oft syndrome possibly?

Yes.. and the problem is that it does put a chill on innovation. No one is going to try to build anything that they think LL might compete with.

However, who knows, perhaps that is what LL wants. There is plenty of work to be done in SL which doesn't require competing with them.

It is probably going to be WAY cheaper for LL to copy GOM than to buy them out... not sure what GOM's profit is, but business are usually sold at multiples of earnings or sales. GOM could probably sell for at least $500,000 USD.

Ahaha. Jamie, do your math.

Average of 2K trades per day at a 10 cents per trade is about 200$ per day or 6K per month.

Small, risky business like GOM could be sold for 8-10 months earnings, or 48K-60K.

LL could add a nice guy premium and pay them 100K with the stipulation that they need to integrate it fully into SL.

Everyone wins.

Bullsh*t. As someone who has actually done M&A work, I can tell you NO business ever sells for 8-10 months income. You're crazy.

Don't forget to factor in the growth factor. GOM could easily fetch 500k.

As well as Zep & Ricky's and growing numbers of us...

Phillip has been talking about this for over a year, in one form or another. When I last spoke with him I understood LL would be integrating the currency exchanges into the client, as well as the major web shopping sites, but that LL would not be directly involved in trading currency.


_/_/

Originally Posted by philip Linden:

"Currency Exchange: I think we need to somehow figure out ways to make it easier for casual or first time users to buy currency more easily from other users. This seems like a huge opportunity for SL producers - it seems to me that if currency exchange could happen with one click for new users, there would probably be US$300K or so in new income for producers - overnight. That would be really cool."


Not only would it be cool - it would verge on the impossible!
How can you possibly implement a secure transaction involving the selection of quantity and payment via a CC with 'one click' on the part of the user? Is this interface going to include a telepathic communication link with the user?

Doesn't he come out with some absolute rot at times? I wonder if the guy has any experience of much of what he pontificates about...

However, if I were running GOM I'd be working hard at providing a nice simple alternative user interface expressly for the non-traders and non-commercial users.
One that simply allowed an unexperienced user to enter either the amount of US$ they wanted to spend, or the amount of L$ they wanted to buy (with the other value automatically updating) and buying with a single click - allowing of course for the PrayPal messing about.

That I think would come close to taking the wind right out of Dreamer Linden's sails as GOM would then be offering a simple to use purchasing interface and the most competitive rate - something any LL run system certainly wouldn't!

Bahaha.

Small companies are not public companies! Public companies can fetch quite a bit, but no one in their right mind would ever pay anything more than 50K for GOM.

Frankly, no one would pay ANYTHING for GOM at the moment. I mean, especially since SL can (and has shown they will and probably are) just integrate them out of existence!

I'm rich, biyatch!!!

Are you rich enough to throw your money away?

Truthfully, Jamie and Ricky should go up against IGE and forget about SL. But, that'd require quitting their day job and getting rich.

They have the CC on file. But, yeah, it'd have to be two clicks. You simply can not do a payment without a confirmation click!

No, but I'm rich enough to quote Dave Chappelle.

Not true! If GOM were for sale, I for one would wanna know - and I'd bet a bunch of others would too!

Your crystal ball needs fine tuning. I'm confident LL has NOT decided to "...integrate them out of existence..."

Yes, I can see paying something for GOM. Their brand is probably worth something. But not a heckuva lot.

Yes he does. And sometimes he uses the forums to send smoke signals.

Yeah, he's into trial balloons. He might want to get a proxy party to start sending up future trial balloons so he can at least back track better.

For the record, I support whatever initiatives Philip Linden undertakes. He is our Lord and King afterall.

Since I believe Linden Lab is one fair and honorable business I am 100% convinced that Philip will make Zeppi and Ricky one fair buyout and job offer. Zeppi Linden and Ricky Linden is just one question of time if it is true that Linden Lab plan L$ trades. It is the most natural thing in the world for one senior partner to buy out the junior partner in such case. No way I could imagine Linden Lab use their position to rip-off residents' research/ideas and do something against them. This is just not how I know this great company and their great people work. They of course will provide Zeppi and Ricky one fair opportunity and draw on their experience and skills. I am also sure we will see similar moves soon in areas such as international community building, sim development, zoning and web shopping. Whatever fields Linden Lab plans to enter themselves, they will do it together with the residents who pioneered them. With fair job offers or cooperation agreements they will make sure that those who had the ideas will be allowed to fairly participate in the success and feel an improvement of their situation, not a disadvantage from Linden Lab entering the field. No way I could imagine Philip would ever allow Linden Lab to use its superior position to compete against resident businesses or to steal ideas. Linden Lab is not Microsoft. Linden Lab is all about win-win, fairness and encouraging and rewarding resident pioneers

Thanks LL for showing us all the iron curtain again. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

As all we are reduced - per usual - to politburo watching, I'll just give brief mention of historical conduct that seem to bear on this issue:

1. The absence of a reply on Hotline to Linden is atypical
   
2. LL is notorious for having no interest in helping customers with inventory lossage (which equates to being US$ lossage these days)
   
3. LL rarely takes actions that places X before LL - for most X
   
4. GOM is widely praised for their customer service, LL has a less than sterling reputation in that department
   

LL has again sown seeds yielding concern from one of their biggest "content" providers which they could so easily dispel with clear statement of intention but aren't. Worse still, all of their recent PR consists of "make money on SL" which would have been impossible without the contributions of Ricky and Zeppi.

Guys, is that a machine gun you are pointing at your foot, or are you just happy to see me?

All glory to the Hypnotoad!



-Ghoti

I think it is quite a leap to take any of that as competition for GOM or web shopping sites - it amazes me how much people are running away with this concept half cocked. The process of getting game currency is too complex right now. Linden Lab is not talking about developing their own currency exchange. They are talking about providing hooks in SL itself that third party exchanges could integrate with to improve the experience for the end user and bring more business to the exchanges. I imagine they would probably charge to have placement in this area, and why shouldn't they? It would bring more business to the exchanges that are there.

As far as the web store side of it, right now, in order to have a web shopping site, a tremendous amount of infrastructure code has to be written to handle the interaction between the site and SL. There is no guarantee of delivery, and you have to put money often into a third party account. This all is a barrier to competition in the space, and also keeps web shopping from it's full potential. Imagine if each real life e-commerce site had to develop all their own code for processing credit cards, and had to handle shipping themselves. Adding a secure payment gateway, a la Paypal, that could be easily integrated into the web site would be wonderful. It would also open up new types of web services that could be paid for with L$. The transaction would be handled securely by LL, the way that a Paypal transaction is handled now. Additionally, they would create a more formal inventory delivery system in much the same way. This would help to guarantee that the customer received their items.

All of this is progress, and is an effort to help third party businesses, not harm them. By helping these businesses, LL is helping themselves as well. Competiting would only stand to harm them, and they have no intentions to do so. A job listing looking for someone to help monetize the tremendous amount of time people spend online was parlayed to a ridiculous extreme.

Ricky and Jamie are not know for being alarmist, quite the opposite in fact. Were I in their shoes, I'd find the steadfast lack of response to be corncerning as well.

Yes, but is it fear of being made obsolete by LL, or is it fear of facing stiff competition in the near future ?

If this were the case, would not one expect that Zeppi and Ricky would be among the first to know? Or have you some evidence that neither we nor GOM has?

GOM has had some out of band communications with SL that we are not aware of.

No, they generally don't go off half cocked. I'm sure they have a reason to be concerned.