Takeover.... a feasibility study.

Firstly, let me explain who we are. We are the existing clients of Linden Lab, referred to, in Mark’s letter to me as...[thanks to Crap Mariner for pointing this out]....

...”users, residents, people, customers, partnership, you”.....though actually we are clients, I would suggest, as we are paying for a service, not buying anything.

Now, I don’t have all the exact data so a lot of this feasibility study is theoretical. That, however, doesn’t make it less or more feasible.

We make SL, the social life, the builds, the PR, the economy, the culture. LL runs a bunch of servers and puts its foot in its mouth occasionally...

Now...before you dismiss this idea totally, consider the slant that Dusan puts on Sion Chickens... here..

“Sion Chickens hold the, um, kernel for new concepts of distributed work. Substitute “rare eggs” for “demanding tasks” and you get the idea – users collecting work tasks based on the level of difficulty and being rewarded appropriately. The embedded bidding and auctioning aren’t so different from crowd-sourcing, but with a difference: instead of trying to get free work from the “crowd”, you’re including proper rewards and pay.”

This makes it theoretically possible to own SL and run it from within SL.

We have more experience of SL than Linden Lab. We are more than 100,000 people with 2 years SL experience (guesstimate) which equals 200,000 years SL experience. We have around 20 years of business experience each, on average, making a total of 2 million years market economy expertise.

We have invested more time in the creation of SL than Linden Lab.

We own full rights to the most valuable SL assets, our skills, which we currently lease to LL free of charge.

We can buy out the venture capitalists or make an offer for the whole bunch of servers the Boys currently operate, though it would be cheaper to buy your own server than pay tier.

We know how to operate complex social and business structures without the need for expensive air-conditioned offices.

We propose a new face to SL where, for example, every premium member is given a share option and further options depending on hours spent inworld, thus reinforcing SL as a business owned by it’s clients.

A group of clients holding a combined quantity of share options (say xxxx) would be given a place on the board. Which would be an intelligent move as the recent 3 or 4 PR disasters could be avoided.

PR is redirected inworld rather than towards fictional future users.

We would further only employ staff who have a couple of years experience inworld.

New members will be allocated a mentor who will gain points (for introducing them to SL) counting towards a share option.

The ‘Linden Prize’ (to be renamed) would be for x,000,000 $ to be split amongst those making the greatest contribution to SL life, e.g. lag reduction, voice improvement, alpha bug, etc.

The future SL could be a devolved power structure where regional boards administer areas in return for tier, the successful would see their land prices rise and new members increase....etc.

No new land would be released. 30,000 sims for 60,000 clients is enough already.

House sales to new members will cease as the future SL will not compete for business with its clients.

Future ToS would recognise that the clients own all the skills which are leased free of charge for as long as the Board does it’s job satisfactorily.

We would be able to raise a very large sum of money, i.e. 1,000,000 users buying share options or, say, land owners boycotting tier for 6 months. Its is easy to raise capital when you are so many people.

....any further ideas..??

:)))

Why I can’t “rest assured”

It was very nice of Mark to write to us all today, after all, he’s a busy man and has lots of staff issues to attend to and restructuring to be done.

He has asked me to “rest assured”.

The thing is that I do not feel very assured... so I thought I would layout my neuroses on virtual paper and have a look at them.


Now, Mark is obviously a very clever man and should know, much better than me, how to run a big company like SL. I should be able to relax that he knows exactly what he is doing and let him get on with his job. It’s never easy to make the transition from pioneer stage to more universal thing, but why is it that I am not convinced?

I have had a few rather worrying times over the last while where I have had reason to doubt his abilities.

He seems to be totally unaware at how shocking some of his past moves have been for us “residents” (god I hate that term, sounds like an institution)... people have set fire to themselves outside his offices in the worst handled PR event of recent years (a simple price restructuring) and many have left and now populate other grids (the combined avatar concurrency has probably increased dramatically if all grids are added together).

A lot of money and man hours were wasted on the latest two projects... the “let’s attract businesses” saga which involved shelving all the Adult content onto it’s own ghetto and rolling out a neat little $55000 package for business users..

....and the latest fiasco of the Viewer.

In an extremely clairvoyant blog (thanks to Nur Ophuls for the heads up) Grace McDunnough asks the very relevant question of who is being ‘targeted’ as the future ‘residents’ of SL.

FunnyFarm meets IMVU in a 3D shopping channel seems to be the answer...

I understand that SL thinks that the creators aren’t bringing in enough income and that millions of new users will buy tractors etc. but... can you really turn your back on the people who made SL what it is and survive??

I know it is a major simplification (that has never stopped me before tho...) to compare Microsoft and Apple, but in terms of ethos it looks, to a simple mind like mine, like Mr. Gates went all out from day one to cash in on every aspect of the computer revolution and has become a very hated company.... Apple seems to have gone about it’s business in trying to provide the highest quality innovation (and had to wait for the rest of the world to catch up) and is one of the world’s most respected companies....

...soo.....Mark’s reassurance that SL is dripping with cash does nothing to reassure me...I don’t care, as long as they aren’t broke, how much cash they make. None of it gets recycled anyway.. ($10,000 Linden Prize is a complete joke for a company that big)...

....and the 70 sims for artistic stimulation...hmmm....all gone very quiet on that front.


Well, I could probably continue on this vein for a while but....


...to sum up...

the FunnyFarm/IMVU/Facebook is such a retrogressive step in my opinion that I cannot seriously believe it is going to improve my experience of SL.

The mass market is a dictator that flattens experience. Those on the margins of the mass are always ruthlessly eliminated ‘for the good of the mass’ and democracy is held up as the shining beacon of ‘why we had to...’

This flattening will never lead to a philosophy that wants to “connect everyone to an online world that advances the human condition”, mass consumerism is always about getting paid as much as possible for as little as you can get away with. We get screwed.

So, I am not assured, Mark.


:(((