Ok...so now it is happening....
DON'T PANIC, the Hitchhikers Guide said, but there will be a massive boost for all those small grids.. Inworldz, Reaction, Open Sim will all benefit from the 30% layoff just announced by the Boys. 100 Boys will lose their jobs and SL will turn into a web based social networking site.
"We've emerged from a two-year investment period during which, among other things, we've spent a considerable amount of time improving reliability and the overall user experience. Today's announcement about our reorganization will help us make Second Life® even simpler, more enjoyable, relevant and engaging for consumers starting with their first experience. It will also enable us to invest in bringing 3D to the web and will strengthen our profitability," said Mark Kingdon, chief executive officer of Linden Lab. "Ultimately, we want to make Second Life more accessible and relevant to a wider population," he said.
Well, the bean-counters have won....sad, but hey, that's life.
Many people will, like me, will wait and see, there won't be an immediate exodus, but the life rafts are being prepared....
Read more here...
:(((
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I know so many of us have been yelling "man the life boats" and a lot of others have accused us of crying wolf....well, I smell wet fur.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to not curse...I'm trying very hard. But this entire bullshit is not what Phillip Rosedale and Linden Lab promised me three years ago!
The coming crap is not my imagination.. my world
Resistance is not futile. It's still our world until they pull the plug, or poison it with Facebookism.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I'm beginning to understand how fish in the Gulf of Mexico must be feeling...
hehehhe....yes, the smell of oil contaminated wet fur....or scales, I guess....well, Lalo as you wrote so clearly on your Blog, resistance is not futile.....but.... the part of me that is not an optimist says that the bean counters always win. The Lindens want to float this thing on the stock market and nothing will stop them from converting their share options into luxury homes and gold edged bonds.
ReplyDeleteThe positive side of this is that it may separate the sheep from the goats...the diaspora is an amazing thing.....
Yo, soror, it's not just bean-counters. It's the suits, aka, venture capitalists, who, contrary to the epithet, never wear suits. The place to look for root causes is to the cadre of venture capital (VC) investors, conveniently listed on the LL web site:
ReplyDelete"Linden Lab (actually, Linden Research, Inc.) is funded by a group of notable investors including Mitch Kapor, Catamount Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Ray Ozzie, Omidyar Network, Globespan Capital Partners, and Bezos Expeditions"
I know the mindset well, having been a victim of it for almost 4 decades now. They all need an exit strategy from their investments. LL is not profitable, and the new CEO apparently has come up belatedly with the idea of morphing into a social network site, as if that would magically increase the market capitalization and stock valuation..
And the VC's bought the line, now aided by the bean counters, who no doubt have pointed out that creative people, fiddling with prims and scripts, take up too much bandwidth and overhead, while not, presumably, paying enough for the costs of distributed incremental compiling. Plus, to service them requires too many digit-heads on staff who cannot stay on timeline and budget. So, off with their heads and let's make money by friending and tweeting each other with a 100% impenetrable web-interface.
So, we can blog each other, or we can let the VC firm partners involved have an earful on the point that without creative builders, SL will become a sterile wannabe of what is already in the metaverse and a poor excuse for the kind of social networking that many will aspire to on WoW. It isn't hard to figure out who the players are from the VC web sites, so let them hear from us. I'm certainly going to bend the ears of the ones that I know.
But, all may not be lost.
If the web interface, which may dispense with the cost of maintaining distributed clients, is properly constructed (ha, fat chance! but maybe if Robin Ducot gets a chance), it may be possible to import object code and XML or HTML5 files created off-line elsewhere in the metaverse. That could work, giving everyone half-a-loaf, especially if the web portal service comes with a decent SDK, including a script compiler/debugger for expert users. LL lowers the overhead, increasing profitability, newbies get to cavort (while giving up their privacy to advertizers as per Facebook(R), and the old-hand artists/builders can still augment/supplement their creative environments to give the newbies something to look at other than the redoubtable Mr. Kingdon's inane art doodles.
Hang in there!
Cobalt Zeplin, when not aajami
Thanks aajami for a very lucid comment. As I said above, I also believe it has a lot to do with 'exit strategy' for the invested capital.
ReplyDelete