Saturday 13 June 2009

The Trouble with Linden Labs.

Well, the Art World will no doubt breath a sigh of relief that I have stopped, temporarily, expounding my half-baked theories of What Is Wrong With Art Today, not because I have run out of things to say (surprised?) but because having already alienated my builder friends by telling them how much I dislike Mock Reality Housing for Mock Humans, and I am in danger of alienating the few Art orientated friends I have left. There are already places where I am as welcome as a Mexican with a cough, i.e. Caerleon....but, hey, ...there 28,000 sims out there...:))

No, today, I was asked to participate in a survey. Pink Linden and Colossus have sent me a survey to fill out, and, tho I don't have a brain the size of a small planet, I do spend more time In-World than most Lindens, (well, I do before the grass court season starts) ...so I am happy to help.

This survey was designed to find out how they can get the likes of me to sell stuff thro XL Street (or whatever its currently called) so they can get a bigger share of the little business I do. Fair enough, market research is almost like "listening to the community" except, of course, you are restricted in the answers you give. ...e.g.... when they ask "how much do you spend on advertising ("Classifieds") you have have to say Zero, rather than "as much as LL"....smart-alec remarks aren't allowed.

So, some questions, like.. how can we sell you more land?... you have the opportunity to say "Other"...then elaborate..."lower tier"...well.......they haven't worked that out yet, then I am pleased to help...after all they are probably mainly geeks. Funny that they still use the word "sell"...they really have come to believe their own hype. This is a common problem.....for, tho I am a Marketing Idiot (tongue-in-cheek is a permanent fixture with me), compared to some...the Marketing Geniuses start to believe their own Hype, and then, whether you are Hyping formalism or land sales....you lose track of fact.

But....bare with me dear reader there is a point to this little tale...... some parts, one in particular in this particular survey, do not allow you to slip past or say "other"... This particular part made me list, in order of importance a set of criteria that I believed would help the retail process.

By this point my interest level had fallen to approx. minus 190%.... so...I could just throw the whole thing in the bin...or lie. I didn't have the option to say..."this interests me less than Gordon Brown".... I had to comply. So I lied.

Now....here we come to the interesting part of this tale (IF there is one!) because....surveys produce false statistics. False statistics produce Policy. Policy gets Implemented and Linden Labs continually fixes Things That Aren't Broken.

So...thats the Trouble With Linden Labs.... :))) Scientific Survey Statisics steeped in stupidity are called "listening to the community"... DUH! read a few blogs and comments instead!!

Give us scalable mega prims, give us shadows, give us flexible sculpties ....advertise SL in RL ... lower tier.... stop fannying around.... any one of those would be cool......with the amount of (my) money they have ...all of them are possible.


:))

2 comments:

  1. Well, don't be worried. The policy the lindens will derive from the survey results will be allmost but not completely disjunct from anything you would pull from a tilted survey result. To me those surveys seem to be just fake "lets show some activism so silence some of the complainers". And of course they never allow you to give those answers you would like to give them ...

    But regarding your art criticism: go on with that! Because well, as someone who makes prims and attaches them to make stuff come alive that's normally not like anything alive at all, I am right there with you - there is far too few stuff that actually goes crazy and leaves RL imitation behind.

    I actually like nicely done RL imitations - but when I visit a very realistically rendered sim, I allways think there is something missing, some added quirks that just point out that it is _not_ RL.

    In a world where you can be what you want and where you can do what you want - what is the point in slavishly sticking to RL limits and conventions?

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  2. yes...the survey did make me wonder if it would just get filed in some harddrive somewhere, never to see the light of day...:))

    Glad you enjoy the little ramblings of my mind...we are obviously in agreement on a few things...:))

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