So you own a business in Second Life® and face challenges from your competitors. That’s fair. Competition is generally healthy and with a little common sense you can make the most of facing off against your competition. And normally, it doesn’t matter who your competition is. You can compete with other inworld businesses and even real life businesses entering the virtual market. While they may have money behind them, money doesn’t necessarily drive the marketing world in Second Life®.
But as a business owner here, you have one major competitor you cannot compete with. One who holds all the cards, calls the shots and ultimately determines who does and doesn’t succeed. That competitor is “Linden Lab®”
“Second Life® is an online 3D world imagined and created by its Residents” is the tag line Linden Lab has used for Second Life®. While we may have imagined and created it, it is Linden Lab that has control over it and its economy. Fair competition is thrown out the window and Linden Lab uses their muscle and influence to choose who succeeds and who doesn’t. How and why do they it?
A good portion of the businesses and residents of Second Life® hold events throughout the week. These range from live music at clubs to fashion shows to meetings to sales and more. Most of these events are planned well in advance and are crucial to the survival of a Second Life® business. It brings in welcome traffic and potential customers.
Linden Lab holds events as well. Usually much larger than ones created by residents, these events have the ability to draw a significant portion of the population away from smaller events. The problem with Linden Lab holding events is that they have numerous sims at their disposal and the ability to market to everyone in Second Life®. Linden Lab is able to announce their events on the start up screen and have their announcement stare at you while you are waiting for Second Life to load. They can also announce it while you teleport and numerous other places that the rest of the residents do not have access to. Keeping in mind that inworld businesses plan their events months in advance, it seems a little unfair to suddenly have Linden Lab announce an event at start up. And quite frankly, why is Linden Lab hosting or promoting events anyway? Shouldn’t this be what the residents do?
I’m sure Linden Lab would not agree that non-scheduled maintenance or downtime is their doing. They would probably claim they are doing what they should be by attempting to resolve viewer and other problems. Well, part right. If Linden Lab would have spent their time making this platform run more effectively and efficiently instead of adding new features like voice, windlight and SLim (which also cause a whole new set of issues), maybe the downtime would be diminished. The efforts of Linden Lab to make Second Life® bigger and better seem to be concentrated more on the bigger and more attractive than on better.
Scheduled downtime is no better. It would be if the schedule was updated more frequently and well in advance so that inworld businesses could plan around it. Generally they only have maintenance dates showing for the next two or three weeks. As I said earlier, events are planned months in advance and how disastrous is it to find out an event you’ve been planning falls on the same day as scheduled maintenance. It would have been nice if Linden Lab set a day and time aside for maintenance and let us know that is the time they will do scheduled maintenance if needed so that business owners could avoid that day and time for events.
One of the newer features in Second Life® is “Showcase”. Showcase replaces the former Popular Places tab in search. While the idea behind Showcase is interesting, to showcase places of interest to new and existing residents, the way Linden Lab handles it doesn’t work. First, they are the sole deciders of whom and what gets listed in Showcase. There are no impartial criteria for establishing an entry. Second, it rarely changes. A good majority of the showcase listings have been there since its launch. The odd listing changes but not significantly. It’s a case of same old, same old. Look at the listings and while some may be interesting and unique, most are just long time businesses that are obviously in good favor with the lab. Hardly an improvement over Popular Places.
Linden Lab in its zeal to make Second Life® more attractive, are tampering with the fair business competition within the virtual world. More business would thrive and more would be attracted to this world if competition was on a level playing field. If this is truly a world imagined and created by its residents, then its fate should be determined by the residents. Linden Lab needs to back off on the daily happenings in this world and get back to the technical issues of keeping it running smoothly. The residents are quite capable of running the inworld functions.
I’ve long felt that Linden Lab is simply concerned with increasing the sale value of Second Life® so that they can attract a buyer and realize a significant profit. The features they add and the disregard they have for residents point directly to them attempting to do this. It’s unfortunate that they seem to care little about the second lives of the people who supported them and helped this world grow.
But as a business owner here, you have one major competitor you cannot compete with. One who holds all the cards, calls the shots and ultimately determines who does and doesn’t succeed. That competitor is “Linden Lab®”
“Second Life® is an online 3D world imagined and created by its Residents” is the tag line Linden Lab has used for Second Life®. While we may have imagined and created it, it is Linden Lab that has control over it and its economy. Fair competition is thrown out the window and Linden Lab uses their muscle and influence to choose who succeeds and who doesn’t. How and why do they it?
A good portion of the businesses and residents of Second Life® hold events throughout the week. These range from live music at clubs to fashion shows to meetings to sales and more. Most of these events are planned well in advance and are crucial to the survival of a Second Life® business. It brings in welcome traffic and potential customers.
Linden Lab holds events as well. Usually much larger than ones created by residents, these events have the ability to draw a significant portion of the population away from smaller events. The problem with Linden Lab holding events is that they have numerous sims at their disposal and the ability to market to everyone in Second Life®. Linden Lab is able to announce their events on the start up screen and have their announcement stare at you while you are waiting for Second Life to load. They can also announce it while you teleport and numerous other places that the rest of the residents do not have access to. Keeping in mind that inworld businesses plan their events months in advance, it seems a little unfair to suddenly have Linden Lab announce an event at start up. And quite frankly, why is Linden Lab hosting or promoting events anyway? Shouldn’t this be what the residents do?
I’m sure Linden Lab would not agree that non-scheduled maintenance or downtime is their doing. They would probably claim they are doing what they should be by attempting to resolve viewer and other problems. Well, part right. If Linden Lab would have spent their time making this platform run more effectively and efficiently instead of adding new features like voice, windlight and SLim (which also cause a whole new set of issues), maybe the downtime would be diminished. The efforts of Linden Lab to make Second Life® bigger and better seem to be concentrated more on the bigger and more attractive than on better.
Scheduled downtime is no better. It would be if the schedule was updated more frequently and well in advance so that inworld businesses could plan around it. Generally they only have maintenance dates showing for the next two or three weeks. As I said earlier, events are planned months in advance and how disastrous is it to find out an event you’ve been planning falls on the same day as scheduled maintenance. It would have been nice if Linden Lab set a day and time aside for maintenance and let us know that is the time they will do scheduled maintenance if needed so that business owners could avoid that day and time for events.
One of the newer features in Second Life® is “Showcase”. Showcase replaces the former Popular Places tab in search. While the idea behind Showcase is interesting, to showcase places of interest to new and existing residents, the way Linden Lab handles it doesn’t work. First, they are the sole deciders of whom and what gets listed in Showcase. There are no impartial criteria for establishing an entry. Second, it rarely changes. A good majority of the showcase listings have been there since its launch. The odd listing changes but not significantly. It’s a case of same old, same old. Look at the listings and while some may be interesting and unique, most are just long time businesses that are obviously in good favor with the lab. Hardly an improvement over Popular Places.
Linden Lab in its zeal to make Second Life® more attractive, are tampering with the fair business competition within the virtual world. More business would thrive and more would be attracted to this world if competition was on a level playing field. If this is truly a world imagined and created by its residents, then its fate should be determined by the residents. Linden Lab needs to back off on the daily happenings in this world and get back to the technical issues of keeping it running smoothly. The residents are quite capable of running the inworld functions.
I’ve long felt that Linden Lab is simply concerned with increasing the sale value of Second Life® so that they can attract a buyer and realize a significant profit. The features they add and the disregard they have for residents point directly to them attempting to do this. It’s unfortunate that they seem to care little about the second lives of the people who supported them and helped this world grow.
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Ciao for now..
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Jenny
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