Competing with the residents

Sadly the thread I want to extend is in the hotline, ah well.



Yes and no. You are already in the textures market so to speak, providing a load of content to us all. Anyone going into textures already knows that, and trusts that you won't sell enough of the same textures as they do to destroy their business.



Depends on how. In principle between picks, 1st life profiles etc. you are providing interested individuals with the chance to do it anyway, you're amending the information/search process that you already provide. You could add a more explicit form too, but adding search functions to improve finding people is not direct competition for them - it has a variety of other potential uses too.



Depends on the precise implementation, but I suspect it would make parts of SLB etc. easier to code (which might make more competition for them). But part of their attraction to many is 1) ease of searching and 2) able to shop whilst not able to get in world... It's not clear how this function would make that easier.



You've also mentioned vehicles. I'm will to bet a whole linden dollar that within 1 week of you releasing the new vehicle code (mono and havok 2 I'm guessing, or just one of those?) at least one and probably several of the resident vehicle designers are doing better vehicles than you provide free.

I do however get the point you're making, whenever you offer new content, new tools, you're changing the world and for a while someone's at a disadvantage. That's been me, you rewrote the llSetPrimitiveParams() code about a fortnight after I started selling items based on it. I swore, studied, swore a bit more, fixed the code. In that rather limited instance you offered a new tool to all that disadvantaged some briefly.

That's NOT the same as deciding you need to move into a totally new market and duplicate a service that is already on offer.

Speedtree, that *might* be getting close, depending on what it does precisely. But the tree people are in the market and you're already there too, and depending on how it's implemented I'll lay odds that eventually the residents make nicer trees with speedtree too - Khamon's trees mimic Linden Trees in many respects, but do some things that yours currently don't too.

Ah, yes, but 99% of the vehicles out today will be obsolete when Havok2 is implemented, when compared to their supercharged brethren. Sounds strangely analogous to the current situation.



Streaming audio and video duplicated in-world services already on offer. No one complained.

Simply vomiting up some history into the discussion.

There WAS no streaming video, was there?

As for the vehicles, having the advanced code would be analogous to them giving me some advanced house making things to use.

That's different from them deciding to be the only in-world offerer of vehicles with that code or being the only people able to use the new house-building tools.

coco

P.S. And - or do I have this wrong - any of us can use the streaming audio and video. The Lindens aren't the only one who gets to use it and we have to go through them.

In other words, the Lindens aren't saying, well, you can still do video, but now you have to do it through us and we will take a cut of it. The audio and video are just sitting there for us to use them - all of us - whenever we feel like it.

There were textures arranged in such a way to mimic video.

GOM is like the textures arranged to mimic video: useful, yes, but then the Lindens introduced a feature making them less desirable.



This gives GOM another market to exploit. Whether they choose to go after it is up to them.




So LLabs are banning all other currency exchangers? Strange, I read it that they were expecting the currency sellers (anshe, gom, ige) to use the new system.




You're using their client to stream them...

LF

I found mention of the ill-fated HIPPO to be rather illustrative. The HIPPO devices were distributed for free by the Lindens; I thought they were a LL creation, I don't know though. The HIPPOs were to ping you when they came near another HIPPO wearer that had shared interests with you. They worked reasonably well, except....

Like all attachments they'd hang people up on sim borders or get left behind in the last sim, fail to teleport with you and so on. The HIPPOs failed not because of the HIPPOs but because of bugs in the inter-sim transfers. Now, a year or so later, spurred mostly by the advent of major bling and some long overdue bug-fixing, attachments do travel much better now.

Anybody could have made a HIPPO, it was pure LSL code. No one used them because the SL servers were so buggy that the cost was far greater than the utility. Players can make HIPPOs, only LL can fix the bugs that made them fail.

I had a Live Help call today from a player who lost most of her inventory between last night and this afternoon. Knowing Weedy's saga of trying to get her inventory to work (not even restored, just not crash) I had simply nothing to offer this relatively new player. It has also been a long standing policy of LL to not offer recompense to anyone for any reason for inventory lossage. Pay L$1000 to upload 100 textures and have them disappear and you'll get nothing except angst.

What I'd not seen addressed at all is what will happen when someone pays LL US$100 for L$25_000 and it doesn't appear in your wallet. I know what would happen with GOM, they'd rectify it. And here is a great asymmetry. GOM (or substitute any L$ broker) lives and dies at the good graces of their customers exchanging L$. On the other hand, LL keeps collecting subscription fees no matter how many L$ transfers they screw up.

But LL could, in principle, write bugless currency handling code, right? Well sure, but over the years botched stipends, traffic, bonuses, permissions, and every other accounting I can recall has seen at least one major failure, some rather frequently. To be fair, when global accounting errors had been made, they did go back and fix them. But as Weedy's saga and anyone who has ever tried to recover lost goods know, one squeaky wheel almost never gets oiled.

Until such a time as LL begins to take reponsibility for the infrastructure and support, I'd never attempt to purchase L$ through them. If you think that I'm manufacturing issues, I'd direct you to section 4.3 of the Terms of Service which begins:Swim at your own risk, folks.