Linden Labs VS GOM

Or it's a hobby... Just a side thought...

Sorry I was only talking about corporate companies not hobby companies.

What if one of the SL residents made a currency exchange that allowed orders to be placed like GOM? Would they be horrible for moving in and competing with GOM. In my opinion competition is not a bad thing. GOM might die in such a case if someone made a better implemented currency exchange even without the edge Linden could have in the currency market.

The fact is that we haven't even seen the currency exchange Linden WILL implement. There are already at least two other currency exchanges besides GOM, and GOM is still not dead. Companies need to improve, and they normally have to compete. I'm not upset about competition just because it is coming from Linden. The competition could come from anywhere. Why should Linden keep from improving just to allow a company to operate with less competition?

Nothing makes money forever. Buggy whips don't make money in real life, because buggy whips aren't needed anymore. It is not bad that real life innovations made the buggy whip businesses lose all their business. SL is in the unfortunate position of being the one that controls almost all changes and adaptions in SL, so they are to blame everytime a change effects someone negatively. This is just something unavoidable if SL will survive itself as competitors come to compete with SL. Change with the times, you are working in a growing 3-D virtual world, so you should expect things to change often. Not all the changes will be bad for you. Linden has to make their customers happy as well to keep business. They are sure to do something you like eventually.

What if one of the SL residents made a currency exchange that allowed orders to be placed just like GOM, except that particular resident also managed somehow to get it built into SL itself?

That wouldn't be fair competition.

coco

Some people think all corporations are evil monsters out to make a buck no matter what. That's certainly what the anarchist fruitcakes think.

Companies are made up of people. Just like bowling leagues, boy scout troups and church choirs. It is fair to say that most large corporations are a little too results oriented. But to say that all business only care about money is wrong.

I have been in business myself for many years, and if all I cared about was money I would own a RL island by now.

Buster

I don't think it is about being fair. I think Linden's advantage is that they are in a position to do a better job than what GOM can ever do. The competition might be short lived between Linden and GOM, but EA is only one competitor that is going to come around to compete with SL later on. If things don't continue to improve someone is going to be in a position to make a virtual world that makes SL worthless. I would much rather do business in a world that has a built in way for trading the currency to $US than in a world that I have to go through a third party then PayPal to reap profits. Competition doesn't have to be fair to do its job of encouraging improvement.

You left out the part where Khamon took the money and stock option.

Hi all! Excellent discussion going on here. And of course, I have to stick my nose right in the middle of it. lol!

Ok, to sum it all up thus far. LL and GOM had a falling out persay. The true details of both sides of the encounter are not disclosed at this time, and probably won't be. Whatever it was that brought LL to make the choice to asimilate a similar and integrated functionality of GOM is not public, although it probably should be.

Now, here are my thoughts on this whole situation. Just like in RL, I will probably base my decision of who gets my business on what kind of service I can get from them. I already know how GOM works, and I'm waiting to see how LL works. If I don't like the way LL does it, I'll probably stay with GOM.

These are really strange circumstances in my eyes. Basically, I see something of some unfair play here in some ways on LL's side. LL has access directly to their systems, GOM doesn't and has to go through a bunch of hoops just to provide what they do (under most normal developer agreements, there might have been better access to servers, API's, etc.) with the tools they are given by LL. LL can directly integrate their service into SL, use LL only API's, and fix/add features needed to get the job done, where GOM can't. This to me seems to be unfair competition. I'm getting more of the "You pissed us off, so now we're going to get back at you" kind of vibe here. Am I right?

I think what would be a good solution is for both sides to make a deal. Here's a solution. Why can't LL provide an in world interface to GOM, and GOM gives LL have a slice of the action? That way, LL doesn't have to expend too much of their resources and development, and GOM can stay in buisness. We have something like that in RL. It's called taxes. lol!

In many ways this scares me as a prospective developer, almost enough to not want to waste my time developing something and then basically have it taken away. I think what I might do is this. I think I'll patent whatever really cool stuff I can come up with in SL. That way, LL would have to pay me royalties for using my ideas if it came to that.

Oh for Heaven's sake Philip, it's not your responsibility to worry about the way I feel. Your animal is going to attract an ever growing ground for years to come. The steady migtration of disgruntled developers has been rewarded with the steady influx of thousands of blingy homemakers over the last couple of years. There's no reason to think that'll stop.

Drop all this community pretense and run the damn company.

Look, you're gonna loose the developers anyway because you're not going to implment APIs for us to work with and we're not teh 5tup1d. Hary hit the nail on the head when he said "use LL only API's" Unless Andrew and Cory are teh 5tup1d, your team are constantly adding APIs to the system for internal use in managing and upgrading the software. It's a simple executive choice, seems more like fear actually, to not write some of those in such a way that residents could use them too.

You hit the nail on the head too saying that y'all wanted to do something minimal, publish a webpage, make the resident open a browser from the help menu and leave the world just like they do with third party sites, rather than integrate the API y'all have developed to manage this feature into the interface so we can use it too. Gee that's a long sentence. What we see is smoke and mirror reasoning attempting to hide the real, deeply seated reason you fear APIs.

Sharing that might win back our trust and loyalty. Well I take that back. No it won't and you don't have to care. Let them eat static.

Thank you Doc for the kind words. Enjoy your trees!

Through the debates on the "soul-less corporation" and "businesses are about making money," I've not seen any consideration of the need for those hosting this infrastructure to get some return on their capital investment.

How much is invested, I don't know, but somewhere there are banks of servers, tended by 24-7 server farm herders, with all the bandwidth and SW chores that come with offering this virtual world. Plus the time of creative capitalists dealing with the issues of managing and protecting this "world." Add to that whatever value (probably more than zero) should be attributed to the "franchise value" of the IP and positional value of the going concern.

If there is not enough money coming in and insufficient prospect of money coming in to those capitalist owners over the next n-years, there is no reason for that capital to stay there instead of going into something more productive, like oil exploration or just T-bills. Those who complain that the owners of this business somehow are evil or wicked because they are figuring out ways to maximize the return on their investment will probably never understand that. Perhaps because they've never had to work or plan to accumulate enough capital to actually invest in part or all of a business.

To Samuel Johnson is attributed the classsic summation of this problem; "But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons."

~ Frank ~