Reprising the Enterprise: Will Working in SL Work?

Soviet special store for the elite and foreigners, known as the beriozka.

There's a strange bug going around in Second Life in the last few days, where your avatar suddenly finds himself alone on the sim where he happens to be, surrounded by endless blue water -- and on a kind of hill or stump with the bottom of the sim missing and the builds poking through into thin air. You crawl around in a laggy terrain and find yourself moving into negative space if you try to leave. Relogging, deleting settings.xml, all those tricks don't work -- and when you see your alts don't have this problem you realize the sim is messed up -- one part of development somewhere else us bleeding into your sim where it shouldn't be. Concierge has confirmed it is a bug being looked at by "engineers".

It's like the way grey squares haunted the grid, before the Lindens made p2p and then made grey squares ubiqutious. Or the way that suddenly , before the Zindra continent and adult verification was ready, you would be arbitrarily blocked from a sim and unable to fly on it, even sometimes getting a funny message about age verification even if you were in PG. The work on that program was leaking into the rest of the grid...

The silos that these Enterprises are supposed to want -- like! -- to be on are in strange contrast to the silos that we were all supposed to "hate" when these same programmers and gurus of Big IT told us haughtily that we "can't" be in walled gardens, that this is so 1990s with /fail Compuserve and AOL, and that we "have" to have an open and interoperable system.

Of course, we see now that open is as open does. Open for me to disclose my consuming habits to you and be available for your scraping in your ad campaigns, open to your endless widgets on Facebook, open to your endless special features you need to plug into SL -- but closed when it comes to your corporate communications and your accountabilityy and closed when you need a secret haven for development -- which is the cave you go to after scraping all the ideas from the playa of the main grid, to mark up and resell.

In reprising the press coverage from her campaign, that dutiful little marketing marm Amanda Linden rightfully gloats  -- except for some mild criticism from Dusan, who is almost like inhouse nowadays, really and "one of ours" for the Lab, there isn't a single discouraging word. One would hardly expect her to link to Prok's blog *smiles*. When it suits them, actually Lindens do, and that's why some people tell me to strain my criticism through a sieve of respectability in the hope that some element of it might "get a larger and/or more influential audience".

No thanks.

Much of the good press that Amanda got was caused by that press MISREPRESENTING what the product is about, as Chris Collins implied falsely that actual opportunities for both Enterprise and content makers to find each other:

“Out of the box, the system comes with content such as meeting rooms and conference areas, which are just ready to go,” Chris Collins, Enterprise general manager at Linden Lab, told me.

“There’s also a marketplace - an area where users can purchase content for their meeting rooms, or if they’re the military, it could be content for tanks and planes, all the way up to full software applications.”

This "area" doesn't exist as such as we know, and is basically just a Second Inventory operation or a ticket that has to be filed individually. Unless Cubey Terra put some freebies in the Enterprise Library or various notorious arms dealers from XStreet have suddenly been made respectable, I'd have to wonder where the military is getting their stuff. They will have to hire people to make it from scratch or shop on the main grid with avatars they alread have, or use XStreet, and do the upload reset trick.

Running the Rivers Red

In response to my declaring war on Justin Bovington -- a symblic and understandably futile act -- somebody named David Peters, who could be their PR guy, tells me I'm in danger of being seen as a blog bully.

Guffaws.

Who spends $25,000 a year and gets back peanuts? Who spends $55,000 a year and gets back..whatever you get? Hello, David? Fuck you. Fuck you very much. Who is the bully in this setting?

Of course, we could expect this from Justin, whom I actually charitably thought back then was just a bit heated about tackiness as befitting from a Brit who tends to hate Americans, and not really sinister -- but now I see the problem is deeper.

"“Many brands have experienced pollution and even counterfeit of their brands in other 3-D worlds or environments--not to mention the questionable material that users put forth that led to a tarnished image for Second Life," said Justin then in 2008. Ugh.

Of course, I could helpfully point out to the snobby Justin that the infamous penising of Anshe Chung occurred because A SOLUTIONS PROVIDER, MILLIONS OF US, WHICH HAD A HIGH-PROFILE MEDIA CLIENT, C-NET -- COULD YOU GET MORE GOLD-PLATED THAN THAT?!!!! -- REFUSED TO PUT ON AUTORETURN AND GROUP-ONLY SCRIPTS AND MANAGE THE SIM PROPERLY.

That the blatant criminality of those devs regarding Anshe's right to dignity and their sheer callous indifference to securing a space would then be put on *us* as content-providers or merchants on the main grid -- well, I just GASP IN AMAZEMENT.

The flak from RiversRunRed David Peters thinks that we have to calmly and collectedly discuss this. No. Not with people who are not in good faith and not decent.

Let me reprise Mr. Peters:

(From comments section to my original post).

Prok,

This is a very simple argument, you've stated it well in earlier blogs posts.

Correct me if I'm wrong here?

This is what you're saying:

Linden Lab are creating a list of preferred suppliers, reportedly for the first round of SLE clients. I also understand, LL are also going to take a considerable chunk of revenue as commission out of Marketplace sales. Content will be vetted, signed off as "authentic". The problem, you don't like that this is happening. You feel that the xtsreet content developers should be the basis of the supply chain.

Is this correct?

We hear you. I'm sure LL also hear.

The problem?

This is turning from an Idea and Suggestion, into a torrent of Abuse and Dogma. Which is a shame, as it's starting to smack of blog-bullying.

You have even used provocative language like 'Declaring War!'. War on what, Linden Lab or their messengers who are just repeating the party line?

From what I can tell, from that article, it would seem that Mr Bovington is saying something quite interesting:

"It has to be more than just content to succeed. It has to offer the Enterprise real reasons for adoption. Which means applications and extended solutions on top of the SL base platform. This is not about the color of the fabric of the reception chairs..."

I have found no mention of any reference in his quotes to a mention of 'substandard content'?!

You also seemed to have left out that he mentioned the 'hybrid' set ups? Where corporates will have the two world's of Private and Open running in conjunction, although not connected. Which means, that content could and will come from XStreet for Open developments.

My concern, this seems to have turned into an excuse for blog-bullying: Kim Anubis last week, Justin today... who next? I'm sure other people are firmly in your sniper sights.

Let's not lose focus here, you have a good argument with LL. Besides, do you think people like Justin have that much influence on LL? As I said before, you're shooting the messenger. The problem here, we're easily derailed into sub-arguments. The real blame is firmly at the feet of the New World Order (NWO) within Linden Lab. They have an agenda. Philip's jump to the left, is purely cosmetic. He's still Chairman, still in charge. The NWO report to the same board, the same Mr Rosedale. They've been told to build up LL into something new. So they can either IPO or Sell it on.

My reply:

1. Justin made the reference to substandard content back in 2008 and makes it again in 2009 by urging that Linden Lab not led a tide of content rain down on the Enterprisers. Which is patently retarded as there is no tide, but a trickle, and not an open system. And Enterprise is perfectly grown-up and can sort through the best content using a wide variety of means, search, recommendations, word-of-mouth, etc.

2. There isn't any loss of focus, but merely a sharp and pointed disagreement with your greed and avarice, Mr. Peters and Mr. Bovington, which apparently you needed to keep out of the way from your sales contacts and systems anybody who would actually compete with you.

3. I didn't "forget" any hybrid arrangements. I discussed them at length. Furthermore, I pointed out that it's all bullshit in a world of OpenSim, Rezzable BuilderBot, Emerald's "beta editions" *cough* etc. etc. that copies and saves builds and content offline and makes it available to upload. This is eminently manageable, but it does need the Lindens a) to put a permissions box on the edit menu b) to automate the process of licensing and prosecutor violators rather than filtrating compliers; c) show some good will and willingess to cut in the main grid -- which they are NOT doing.

4. Indeed it IS about the colour of fabric! People making these builds put in a huge amount of detail. Go and review the Navy build or IBM's green server room or any other build -- these are not slackers, they have every nut and bolt in place. And the only way to ensure that ongoing excellence is diversity, choice, and mass amounts of items to make that choice. It is not a sorting problem, except in your mind if you are creating hobbles to ensure special privileges for yourself.

The requirements of Enterprise are understandably the requirements of Enterprise; they are compatible with a free market with free media which the Enterprise uses to find what it needs; there is no need to hobble markets or media to achieve this overall goal. The solution to IBM needing something better than the Walmart's bargain copy paper or electric light bulbs for sale isn't to shut Walmart's down or tell it that it can't sell even a box of toilet paper to IBM let alone an individual lamp to an individual IBM employee; rather, the solution is to enable all kinds of channels of communication from industry publications to expos to conferences to main grid demos to enable commerce to thrive. Innovation cannot happen in a closed box. In real life it *doesn't*.

Then you get nits like Lalo Telling who seems unable to even understand the issue, and is lashing about furiously with his 'amateur ethno-sociolost furry perspective" as he tells us, to try to prove that we need "good stuff" for business and it 'can't be crappy". Justin Bovington of RRR says this about the SL Work Marketplace:

"It has be less Xstreet, more Wall Street. It has to reflect relevance, rather than drowning us all in deluge of content: clothing, furniture and avatars," [Bovington] wrote, adding "if [Linden Lab] attracts the right people to develop these apps, this could be the tipping point."

UGH UGH UGH!!! 

So I say this:

Since when do we have economic rules in free enterprise liberal democratic *America* that can creates closed Soviet-like stores where only the elite can sell to other elites, and also make public calls to stop "flooding" the market?

KEEPING THE GRID FREE OF SCHLOCKMEISTERS

So young furry conformist Lalo says this:

Since when? Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Since the establishment of sainted laissez faire free-market capitalism itself, which allows corporate management to make their own internal rules and their own purchasing decisions. The suits who make those decisions -- such as the one to purchase and install an instance of SL Enterprise on their server racks -- have the right to not merely expect but demand quality in what they buy, and trust that it will work the way they need it to. The schlockmeisters who are the bulk of content purveyors on the Main Grid and XStreet not only won't get in, they shouldn't.

Um, my call to OPEN UP the ability to sell to Enterprise and OPEN UP their choices for purchase IS about in fact "sainted laissez-faire capitalism". It's about letting capitalism BE. Which it would do without Glenn and Amanda Linden in the way. Enterprise can make THEIR rules about purchase -- GREAT!

But that's not what we have here. What we have here is the Lindens' rules about who can sell -- which is also a rule about what purchasers can buy. CONTROL of content and purchasing. NOTHING LIKE LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM OF CHOICE.

There is an unexamined premise here that goes like this: "Unless the Lindens corral their loyalist gold service providers to pre-filter content it will not be good enough". Says who? Nobody plays that role in real life. A RL purchaser of high-end consulting and content knows how to work contacts and the industry press and expos and find what she wants without having to force her to buy only the overpriced stale cavear and chipped matrioshka dolls in the Soviet state store.

She doesn't have to DEMAND that a closed store exist only with licensed providers in it; she knows how to shop *shrugs*.

The "shlockmeisters" in fact are locked in the state store in systems like that,  not locked out. And frankly, most of the content on the grid isn't the "shlock claimed" -- the real banality of tastes we're about to see will be on those SLE grids, mark my words. We are about to see an explosion of Hilton Hotel High Concept...

I'm not getting this. Anshe Chung's el-cheapo sculpties look pretty good, and the price is right. Somebody prototyping and wishing to save a buck can't use them? The neuralgic Troy with his knock-off FLW furniture makes excellent stuff but doesn't have GSP status, what, he needs a permit to sell architectural designs that in fact aren't copyrighted (right? We established that *cough* right)?

Ingrid and Barnes make excellent office and home furniture -- they could be said to be "inspired" by great works but in fact their work is very unique for SL. They can't sell to a purchaser from SLE unless invited in by a GSP?

So is the story going to be that every content creator in SL is presumed guilty until proven innocent?. Are you going to tell that I'm not going to find Kim Anubis' "ice cube texture" on the Internet in Google images lol?

And the Lindens and the lapdog tech press can't make up their minds: it's a tide of rich content, a cornucopia to chose from? Or a load of shlock and crud that has to be beaten back with a stick.

ICE ON THE DECK?

Is SL Enterprise a world burner?

I don't think it really got noticed. The only real-life serious press coverage read outside the Digital Beltway and even Silicon Valley is in the Financial Times, and even there the story got ghettoized in the FT tech blogs.

The Lindens are going to have to work at getting the Wall Street Journal or Esquire or the Washington Post to pay attention. The WSJ still has the largest circulation in America. The columns on the nytimes.com pages would reach their actual market of buyers better than FT. The treatment they will get from these publications, if they decide to pay attention, will not be as breathless.

The coverage, while positive, is anodyne. It's the routine coverage of re-chewed press releases that we can expect from the tech press, the lap dog of Silicon Valley and its works as I said, and the confused mainstream press. It will change over time as more in-depth pieces get assigned if it has any uptake.

The arguments that people on the SLogosphere or forums are making are not the ones that you will hear in the industry (which have more to do with how willing people are to avatarize instead of webize):

WHAT THE NAY-SAYERS ARE SAYING

o "It's too expensive, my God, sticker shock, $55,000".

People making this claim are inexperienced and unused to the budgets of large firms. It is a normal price for a conferencing tool. People spend more on that renting rooms and providing luncheons at the Marriott. They spend more on conference calls and video conferencing. So it's a normal price and one that even if steep, is still a rounding error for many budgets.  The Lindens, if they took full price from the existing 14 customers they show in the list, have $770,000 US they didn't have from us buying homesteads and putting chickens on them.

o "There's only 14 customers, they had them any way, they won't get more".

Well, so be it, but $770,000 isn't a minor amount; to get the same thing out of consumers, the Lindens would have had to sell 518 homesteads ($345 plus $95 x 12). Check their figures, and see that the rate of homesteads isn't growing that fast. I can see that not only Amanda but Hamilton and lots of other Lindens would love to be able to hustle even just a few more Enterprises instead of having the headaches and bling and agida that is required in getting 500 more homesteads.

With Jack Linden playing Russian roulette on your server performance options now, the last of the inworld businesses may just be handily shook off the grid anyway.

o "Consumers are really the Lindens' core customer, they shouldn't shaft them"

Enterprise may be relatively small now by contrast with consumers, but it is the Next Big Thing, and I'm betting that the Lindens' ultimate fervent hope is to pass off the handling of consumers to one of those big Enterprises.

So the way that the Enterprises get set up now and the rules and practices will definitely affect how we live down the line -- the most likely development isn't an IPO or a buyout or merger, but just more and more sales of Enterprise kits until bigger ones can take care of the old job of maintaining 30,000 sims on a server farm and then growing them larger. Obviously, if you can get out of the business of spinning 30,000 plates with a staff of 300 needed to keep 1.3 million people happy on those spinning plates, and you can go into the business of spinning only 100 plates that in turn take care of 10 million people, *and make more money and have less expense* you'll do that.

"The Lindens will fail, no one needs this."

Well, I don't wish them failure. I hope they sell this, and that Amanda Linden is put to work serving this sector and gets out of the hair of consumers and stops trying to make policies for them, the way Pink Linden has evidently retreated into having open calls for content instead of feting only her friends. Amanda is not needed to groom the main grid. She needs to go over *there* and wait on those people *over there* and not change the existing world but just serve the people *over there*.

I actually think they won't fail, just like they haven't failed up until now with the wacky things they've been doing, and they'll add on some customers and stay profitable. I imagine 50 customers by next year is distinctly possible as some universities and competitors to those existing firms there start signing up to see what it's about.

"Open Sim can do this cheaper and better".

As I keep saying, there is something precious being sold on top of the simulators for the $1000 a pop:

Lindens.

And something even more precious:

Other people, whom you may come to miss after you sit in your SLE Hilton Hotel-styled conference room by yourself with your comb-over king boss-from-hell and the dragon lady from accounts receivable for any length of time.

And no, again because their ethos is one of the pioneer gold-digger and sandboxer, not customer service and continuity of service. People that don't want an economy, are collectivists, and hate capitalism might serve big IT for awhile in their craven opensource grabbing, but ultimately, they are cast aside. Big enterprise does need to avow capitalism and does have to have a notion of the economy of their own customers, too, although that may not be apparent to them.

CLOSED SOVIET STATE STORE

Now, let's come to the SL Work Marketplace.

The Soviets had state stores for several reasons:

o to decide what the economy could make and sell best (caviar, fur, wooden dolls -- Soviet industry was largely a hunting-and-gathering economy once you got past the nuclear missiles).

o to make sure they got a big commission on sales

o to enable only loyal craftsmen to have access to higher amounts of sales

o to keep foreign purchasers from interacting without state involvement with artists and merchants

o to control the ideology of the content

o to spy on what foreigners bought better

The minute the Soviet government collapsed, these stores lasted about five minutes. I remember watching a heavily-guarded beriozka in Leningrad on Nevsky Prospekt where I used to by painted wooden boxes, Finnish orange juice and Belgian chocolate transform into a Komsomol-connected bank called Menatep.

As soon as somebody else could import the orange juice and put a variety of painted boxes out on the sidewalk for foreigners to buy, they had no need to travel to one single state store and wait in lines there before the items, wrapped with flimsy "znak kachestva" paper were put into plastic bags with giant roosters on them.

WE ARE ALL AMATEURS, EVEN THE GSPS

The discussion here on my blog is emotional, amateur, confused, incorrect in places and angry. And that's ok. I am happy to be an amateur myself; amateurs make up most of the world; they are the people who birth the babies if you can't make it to the hospital.

If you thought this was a catfight, whew, go and see Hiro have at it over here.

It's sort of odd that Dusan and Gwyn and Kim and I all feel the need to write each other REALLY LONG memos of the sort that you write to a job when you are getting ready to quit it or to a boyfriend that you will likely break up with, but there it is. They're long, and they're worth reading, but the lachyrmose quality of Dusan's protestations of his immersionist cred and Gwyn's injured-but-not-innocent protestations of contextual and historical exigencies in the reading of her arch remarks to me and my rages against the dying of the artificial world light -- these are ultimately only just historical ephemera.

What matters is that in one line quoted in the tech press, Justin Bovington, hitherto thought of as a friend and good guy all around, could not only add insult to injury but unmask the entire venture (in the way cube3 is always cynically-romantically hinting -- it's as if cube can reserve for himself some idealism if he can be first to see through the latest grasping Silicon Valley ruse). He could reveal the entire thing was merely a prototype for business to generate lots of scrap -- that now was *in the way and had to get gone*.

I thought I'd hear this some day from Mitch Kapor or Amanda Linden, who still holds herself back from saying what all Lindens think. I didn't expect to hear it from Fizik Baskerville, but then, I should have realized, the first time I found that the rare next-to-the-mainland island he used to ran called Avalon, which I couldn't teleport to because it was group-closed, was open to Barnesworth, but not me. I'm trying to think how it was I finally managed to get into his special store of that era and buy my colour-changing sneakers...

There are some troubling side stories going on. Amanda Linden's crusade to privilege "work avatars" and try to soften all of us for the punch was creepy --likely a marketing technique in which in a stage process, the old customers were going to be allowed to express their anxiety and indignation about being forced to lose their furry outfits while simultaneously providing their obsolete status on the forums to this elitist Linden.

If all the business people are on the Nebraska plan, cut off from the main grid, why do *we* need to shape up?! Why did we need to hide our genitals and poseballs in Zindra, if they weren't even going to be coming here!

That's where the Lindens hustle starts to let the mask slip -- because they really do see the main grid still *primarily* as a launching pad to create more enterprise customers, likely conceived as the greatest profit center in the future.

Gwyn forgot to mention that she has handily gotten herself a Community Gateway registration API set-up, along with her GPS medal, so that people randomly joining SL can pick *her sims* to get orientation on. She will then delouse people who come in interested in business but still not ready for prime time in their slutty freebies and overscripted shoes, and put them through their paces to go be worker avatars.

Then there's the curious remarks of "Biff Pendragon," who says the devs are fighting each other -- something that might be visible in this thread except I don't know who this guy Wainwright is.

There's no question that somebody like Hiro, who likes to tell everyone he "got me banned" from the grid, is an insecure but simultaneously arrogant wannabee, and is likely busy dumping on the other GSPs even as they dump on him (in fact, if you talk to most GSP folk, they are universal in their opinion that Hiro is a toad.)

Involve does very good work, of course, and to be honest, I'd hire them myself for RL work, while making sure that somebody could tie up Hiro in a broom closet if I had to visit their office.

But then there's this woefully false reading of the Marketplace that I can't decide is ignorant or deliberately cunning -- to create a false picture in order to remove the one point of major criticism that people on the grid have of this program.

...AND SLICK PROFESSIONALS KNOW BETTER

Gatsby, as Max Burns is known in SL (Max Burns is his real name and he is not the avatar by that name), seems to aspire to position himself to be cool and relevant to his lobbying firm's clients in Washington, DC. He tells me that he has taken on "Pixels and Policy' as just a hobby, but few people with that set of resume criteria do anything as "just a hobby". He wants to be cool, like Duranske wanted to be cool.

And speaking of Mrs. Duranske's little boy, Benjie is now praising Stroker's lawsuit. That might seem counterintuitive, until you realize that Duranske is for lawsuits just as as general premise, as it gives him and his firm work, but it also fits his geeky opensourcenike background to undermine DRM within worlds and copyright protection as a technical fix and steer everybody to the meatworld solution of men in three-piece suits.

Some people think SLE will sink of its own weight. It won't. The Lindens have staked too much on it, and so have these big customers.

So the battle now isn't to keep telling us like a know-nothing yahoo that you can set up a Dell server in your basement for a fraction of the price, the battle is to get the Lindens to open up the store.

WHY RAGE IS JUSTIFIED AND NEEDS TO KEEP BOILING

Here, I've decided that being rude, forceful, combatative, angry and even vulgar is ABSOLUTELY the way to go given the blanket oppressive coverage of the tech press and absolute failure to notice this problematic issue of the closed store -- or to cover it very wrongfully through a lobbyist's blog -- which may be deliberate. (Gatsby tells us that he is a "hobbyist" with his blog *cough*).

And yes, rage, and yes, absolutely, not because of mere Google bombing, but because the markers need to be put down and need to be bright glowing embers on the ground.

To the extent possible, I want the asses of these people to be burning hard as they try to justify this avaricious heist and I want them to always and everywhere tie their reputations to it.

There is absolutely no justification for any closed store -- full stop.

There is absolutel no justification to mischaracterize content made freely in Second Life, and the merchants and crafts people of Secon Life on the main grid as substandard -- ever.

I don't know what it will take to set M Linden's hair on fire. He says he checks Twitter every day to see if his hair *should* be on fire. Surely November 5, a day of fireworks on Guy Fawkes day, didnt even singe a lock of his precious prim hair, as strike-breaking Tateru Nino was on hand to interview him prettily and neither of them even made any reference to the Artist's Voice action that constituted a boycott from blogging, sales, and uploads for two days.

Enterprise customers themselves will ignore the GSPs thrust at them, will use their own people, will make their own customers and then load up sims and transfer them. So the extent that people can rage, portray the GSPs as mediocre (some are) or impossibly precious and assholey (see Hiro) or unprofessional (see Gwyn ranting in the comments about context lol) -- it's all good. Let the purchasers look farther and wider. Let GSPs now under the greatest scrutiny of their lives stop being assholes and be inclusive and find ways to bring in the rest of the grid rather than cutting it off.

WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT ALL ALONG... AND WHAT IT COULD BE ABOUT!

In fact, we now -- breath-takingly -- can see why the Lindens never did anything about the reset exploit, which was the reason for Stroker's lawsuit against a mouth-breathing fat kid who lived in a trailer copying his stuff, and my dutiful breaking of the exploit story, and Eric Reuters' excellent sleuthing on the story (what ever happened to him eh? lol).

The Lindens needed this exploit because...it would be later *deliberately* used to move content to their SLE customers' grids.

Think about it.

I pay about $25,000 a year in tier to the Lab. I can't get a sim where 50 chickens of 6 people have been killed reset, because the Lindens refuse to take on the copyright implications in generating secondary copies. I'm hit with specious and cynical arguments about the chickens "behaving as their creator intended" in dying en masse from being summary dispatched off-world by Emerald developers Lonely Bluebrid and Discrete Dreamscape -- and I can't get my sim reset. I have to rely on the good offices of the sionChicken people, who in fact do replace all 50 painstakingly in separate folders going to each person and being checked against a data base.

Lindens will never, ever EVER roll back a mainland sim unless you jump up and down and scream for 3 days when once again, some hackster has terraformed your land completely, destroying builds and forcing off tenants. As a matter of policy, the Lindens will not flick these switches that are so easy to flick.

But for $55,000 they will; and they will not as an exception but as an actual method of moving content.

Go know!

What's important to see here is that $25,000 and $55,000 are not that different; sim rollbacks should come with either package or be available for a fee. That they aren't is an ideological problem, not a technical one.

Once you understand THAT, you see that there's no reason to be bifurcating the grid even if some of it is legitimately to be in silos.

Once can conceive a system where by the Lindens had everyone who wanted to sell to enterprise rez their products on sims; those sims were transferred to a separate grid and re-rezzed; and the enterprise customers would browse them -- there would be a cutaway. The store sims would not be connected to the main grid, although connected to the Enterprise customers on demand, coming and going, something like the way you have to visit a separate store sim in Sims Online for certain discounted things not buyable in inventory (remember when they made that change to encourage people to open up bulk discount stores as an activity?)

"Specialness" needs to migrate away from the nature of the transaction to the nature of the transmission.

There may be "issues" in the silos connecting to anything at all -- but wait, we heard Glenn Linden tell us that there will be a way to load content on a sim and then transfer it to an SLE customer.

If it can be done one time with the existing customer's content to his enterprise sims, it can be done forever for all enterprise sims as a system. How hard could it be? 

Everyone rezzes stuff on a sim or sims who wants to sell stuff. The enterprise people  come and view it on the main grid accounts that surely they have as they've all been on the main grid, or they add one for free; they flag those goods they want to buy by clicking on a kiosk; the rest are returned and the entire sim moved into the enterprise zone.

Easier to do on Xstreet you say or a separate WStreet? Well, maybe -- except you can't interact, look at something in 3-D, test it, etc. And Glenn and others keep talking about the ability to 'test and protototype" before buying.

The willful ignorance  -- or cunning malevolence -- of Max Burns of Pixels and Policy in misrepresenting this helps create that climate of propaganda and confusion that in fact serves the few benefitting better.

And lest there actually survive any people still willing to stand up to the Lindens after being deleted on the forums, they'll be told by Justin Bovington not to flood the precious new Enterprise people with crappy sculpties.

It truly is astounding to think. Enterprises are free actors and can pick and chose out of a marketplace what they need. In real life, Justin doesn't require a special store that sells only to his class of people, closed to others, to make sure his office foyer has something with more taste than Ethan Allan or IKEA.

In real life, people form Zagat reviews, magazines, industry journals, catalogues, purchasing groups and hold expositions and trade fairs to put the right content in front of the right buyers. They don't create closed warehouses.

There is absolutely nothing to prevent Amanda Linden and Glenn Linden, once they take the sticks out of their asses on this, to solicit open calls to Business Expo 2010 and have anybody *who wants to* regardless of dev status or certified this or that place their content on a sim for review. There is absolutely nothing to stop one of the coder Lindens from adding a box on the edit menu tomorrow, "I certify that this is my own work" or even creating a website that people could access like a wiki to register their designs and sign boilerplate.

Say, um, *cough* isn't this what your friend Beth Noveck was supposed to be doing with peer-to-patent, her magnificent invention that was supposed to get rid of patent trolls and big business sitting on ideas, Amanda? Isn't it ironic that the sort of behaviour Beth claims she's targeting with peer-to-patent is *your behaviour right now* with this GSP program?!

Unfortunately, I don't see the merchants getting up to speed on this problem and doing much about it, if this thread is any indication. I think either some are silent because they simply hope if they keep their Linden cards active and warm the seats of office hours they will get on the list and not have to worry about how to register themselves.

Some may quietly protest to Amanda and get her to move a little more speedily in cutting in the rest of the merchants.

Plenty of shills, alts, evangelists, whatever they are can be found now on the forums touting all kinds of draconian plans for instituting even more corporativist plans to ensure only a very, very superior and privileged content-production class ever gets to sell in SL. By contrast with *that* (and that may be the idea!!!), any plan merely to sign a Verified Merchants List with a few criteria will seem like a day in the park and people will go for it.

All this talk about 30  percent commissions on Xstreet in lieu of tier or selling by premium accounts is meant to put fear into people so that they will go along with a program that restricts their freedom, but not THAT much. Genius, eh?

There will be no shortage of nits who come along and tell me that I'm hyprokitical, too, because I demanded copyright protection and then bitched when things were locked down.

That's retarded of course, because what is locked down in the SL Enterprise Workplace Store isn't copyright, and it isn't locked so that copyright can be protected; it's locked to create protectionism for one connected class of people.

JACK LINDEN'S GAME OF SIM ROULETTE

Added to all this filtration of the grid into classes of people in a corporativist model is the notion now that FPS will be at the discretion of Jack Linden. I don't regret cutting his card, as I've cut all Linden cards now except Philip Linden's. Now, while promising everybody who is on a crappy class 4 server that they will no longer be stuck, he is essentiaLly saying that Linden will make discretionary calls as to whether you get the best stuff, depending on your importance to their mission, the amount of real bot-free traffic you get, etc. How will these judgements be made? It's anyone's guess. If automatic, what will be the criteria?

When you bought a class 5 sim you bought a certain list of performance improvements; now, everyone is "equal" on the animal farm with equally bad servers but a few will get better servers through sucking up to Lindens or being "relevant".

(As usual, Ciaran has distinguished himself whining about grandfathering which cuts into his business, as have the odious Ewan Mureaux and othes clamouring for the $195 grandfather of November 2006 islands be withdrawn, so that no one ever compete with them. Of course grandfathering isn't really related to classes, as many class 4s were changed to class 5s long ago -- it should be about date of purchase, not class. All that will happen with de-grandfathering is the Lindens will once again take a huge hit in business as people have to dump mainland and islands, as they did with the homestead price hike. Ciaran and Ewan are of course selfish pigs in not seeing the knock-on consequence of this for the whole economy again.)

All in all, we are headed for even nastier times, with a war of all against all in the making, a war that I personally think  needs to be fought.

Comments

[Ciaran Laval]

Neither Ewan or I called for an end to grandfathering for all, we called for an end to grandfathering on transfer. There's a big difference between the two and you damn well know it.

[melponeme_k]

"That's where the Lindens hustle starts to let the mask slip -- because they really do see the main grid still *primarily* as a launching pad to create more enterprise customers, likely conceived as the greatest profit center in the future."

LL is now in the business of birthing baby grids. This is the ultimate end result. Think of SL as a place to teach companies how to run an interactive world. The companies will get to experiment concepts on their closed grids while their reps scrape our data on the main grid. They can't get rid of us, we are the Dumbo, Shibuya, Portobello Road etc of virtual worlds.

They will sell our tacky behinds back to us within the next few years.

They just don't want to be public because they don't want us to see what they do take.

[cube inada]

"He could reveal the entire thing was merely a prototype for business to generate lots of scrap -- that now was *in the way and had to get gone*.

i THOUGHT i did.?;)

Cynical Optimist-

ive used this term to describe my being for decades...

I accept that filter unconditionally.:)

Ive learned you cant tell anyone anything, Experience is all that seperates expert from amature. BOTH can love the work.

Experience ends the amature.. but its not free or fast. Its not something as SHINY as Meta. IT has value. It Can be VALUE.

darkest before the dawn,,,yada yada. or not.

p-2 -- im not taking the test.;)
But soon hunger may force me to steal the Burritos.

[Prokofy]

Ciaran, you did not make it clear that you specified transfer, that is not what you said on the forums even if you clarified later in the blogs, so stop being an ass.

[Max Burns "PixPol"]

Prokofy --

Loved the amusing write-up of my blog. I'd love to be smart enough for malevolence. Wish I were as much of a D.C. lobbying fat-cat as you make me seem!

[AnnOtooleInSL]

Maybe LL needs to pay a little more attention to the fact the FTC has them on their radar which means they can easily fall into the FTC's sights. Attempting to control and manipulate international trade is the domain of Congress not Linden Lab. I advise Klingdon to make the changes in his staff necessary to remove the old guard that practices blatant favoritism and seeks to control and manipulate international trade. I think there are some racketeering laws that may apply as well.

"Traditionally, the word racket is used to describe a business that is based on the example of the "protection racket" and indicates that the speaker believes that the business is making money by selling a solution to a problem that it created (or that it intentionally allows to continue to exist), specifically so that continuous purchases of the solution are always needed. Example: in a protection racket, a representative from the racket informs a storeowner that a fee of X dollars will be required every month for protection money, though the "protection" that is provided comes in the form of the racket itself not causing damage to the store or its employees."

In effect Linden Lab would do well to completely reset the solution provider program in it's entirety and start over by disallowing any participation in it by anyone involved in it's current configuration. I'm sure there are best practices somewhere to follow that don't include favoritism and attempting to control international trade.

Alternatively Linden Lab can dispense with all of the issues in a single move and close the Second Life Grid and be done with it and only sell SLE. They simply won't need many consultants to provide content and they can be happy with their cottage business and leave the development of the 3D Metaverse to other organizations with an active interest like Microsoft who has execution capability like no other and who is likely to advance the 3D Metaverse faster than anyone else can. Heck even the video game companies are shifting to "MMOFPS" where war endlessly rages in large scale "grids". I think someone is missing the good intel on what all is really going on in this business space.

Right now it feels more like LL is just keeping the main grid open for a money stream and have little intention of advancing it while they are fully focused on SLE. What do they need for that? 10 developers?

Klingdon needs to stand up and state in unambiguous words exactly what *his* Second Life looks like in 2010, 2011, 2012, and beyond so people can make the adjustments and plans they need to make.

[Prokofy Neva]

Max, are you going to correct the record of your mistakes about this program that are TERRIBLY misleading or just misrepresent it to hype to your clients?

What's to research, Hmz, that Ciaran is an ass and is double-talking himself out of this now? But I knew that.

[LeVey Palou]

"Right now it feels more like LL is just keeping the main grid open for a money stream and have little intention of advancing it while they are fully focused on SLE. What do they need for that? 10 developers?"

And in a nutshell you have stated what all of us have known but not said in so many words. That they plan to fleece the residents for every penny before ultimately pissing on us.

With the homestead fiasco they knew what they were doing. The Lab made enormous profit on both ends of that abortion.

This platform means so much to so many people...it is a personal experience, people live out their dreams and fantasies through this medium.

That means nothing to the Lab, the fact that they have a responsibility to people that is more altruistic than their need for capital which they make in abundance already. I am ok with them making money, I want them to make money, but I also want them to acknowledge this amazing product means something.

That is the real shame in all this I believe. They missed the most important factor about their product and it is the factor they wish to to excommunicate.

[Prokofy Neva]

I actually think that's a pretty primitive interpretation, LeVey, and you should stop being so self-referential about all this. I don't think "it means nothing" as anybody who had a product that produced people who would stay on it 40 or even 100 hours a week wuold have to grasp what they had, even if their attitude toward it was cynical and derisive.

While it is true that these very rich people put in their own money, and don't have that same feel of a need to work and gain profits the way we might, they have still made it a goal to make the company profitable, which apparently it is, barely, but they've ploughed the profits back into development to make it better (to me, begging the question of whether they really are profits then if so much development is needed).

I think the Lindens realize that many people's hopes and dreams are attached to their product, but long ago, in 2005-2006, they began to make it clear that there is the product and their need to market it, and your hopes and dreams, and they are separate, and they are not responsible for your use of their product.

They aren't interested in making a world with us, which is what I thought they were at first, so it's a disappointment, but, hopefully, one could be made without them.

I think if you read the interviews with M Linden, you can't fault him for not saying SL means something, although my main take-home about it is that he is mainly just buzzing in market-speak about its cool features.

Still, I don't think you're really realizing what it means for someone like Kingdon to come and take on this very risky and complex position and to put the positive energy he has put into it. Have you ever had to do something like that in RL? I have. It's hard.

You would have to say, without even being a fanboy, that he has improved performance and is trying to get more sales (which he did with XStreet's buy) and better service and more signups (which hopefully the viewer will deliver -- that's the proof of the entire pudding if he does).

I think people fall into this bitter self-pitying shtick around Second Life which is mainly about their inability to try to make things of their own with or without the Lindens.

I've always tried to find projects that doesn't rely on them, and then when I hit a wall where they are in the way and causing a problem, I start petitions, publicize things, etc. and try to change it, and if it's impossible, I try to find something else to do. Ultimately, there are the limitations one should expect from a place that is only on the Internet and not in your real home.

I do feel they haven't quite got the mixture right for what they need to do to ease the transition. The messaging is so horrible from Amanda Linden and some of the others precisely because they are cynical marketing MBAs for whom those "hopes and dreams" things are just silly abstractions that they think of quaintly as the culture of people they have contempt for. But I don't think all the Lindens are like that from what I've seen, and I'm not sure the most cynical Lindens will stick around anyway.

Ultimately, you have to take it a a good sign of their decency that so many Lindens who saw this coming, who knew about these things before we did because they were inside, left the company, whether Robin or Jesse or Everett or Sidewinder, they may not have specifically left over the more cynical commercialization of SL, but it was all part of the mix.

I think we can't object to the cold commercialization of SL in ways that we will find sick-making being too close to the making of the sausage. What we can insist on however is policies that do not harm us. That we have to wring out of them, and I said, here has to be a transaction cost for their stepping on us.

I'm actually hoping that as rocky as the ride has been, the Lindens are going to pull up their socks, get rid of opensource extremism at its most destructive, as the did with ad farms and bots, and they're going to more or less chart a course that will preserve some of what was the old SL, but of course, not all of it.

[Passing Merchant]

hmm enterprise solutions on a special super useful grid, when LL told staff to relocate or lose job...

Way to promote your own product

[LeVey Palou]

"The messaging is so horrible from Amanda Linden and some of the others precisely because they are cynical marketing MBAs for whom those "hopes and dreams" things are just silly abstractions that they think of quaintly as the culture of people they have contempt for. "

Agreed. You said it clearer than I did.

"and they're going to more or less chart a course that will preserve some of what was the old SL, but of course, not all of it."

Good grief how much is left now and will there be any left when they are done?

I think too much of the culture is lost already. I feel it was cast aside without any regard and that really concerns me.

But I will also say yes there are good Lindens aboard. Most of concierges are a decent group, the evening shift in particular. The problem I see though and what I throw stones at is they are not decision makers. If those Lindens who were in touch with the community were at the helm SL would be a much better place. I would rather spend my time praising than condemning because frankly I find it taxing on my fiber to complain so much.

I used to take great joy in advocating SL to people who had never heard of this before. I miss that feeling.

With kingdon I do not feel he ever appreciated the culture here. When he was new and we were greeting him and excited to have a noobie leader with fresh ideas and we shared with him our creations, our visions, our hopes and dreams I feel he was mentally attaching price tags on what he saw and not sharing in it's rapture. I feel his vision of the goal is far from any of ours. He wants to make this something ugly, some thing corporate. Something AOL.

I hope you are the one who turns out to be right and I turn out to be way off base on this matter.

[Tracy Welles]

"This is turning from an Idea and Suggestion, into a torrent of Abuse and Dogma. Which is a shame, as it's starting to smack of blog-bullying."

Pretty much what I said. If it's not war on one thing, it's war on something else.

I still say Prok should take all of her skill and put it to fine use in programming. If she could get just half of what she writes done in code, we would have web 5.0 here by now.

And while everyone wants to make a big deal about this SLE, I'll stick to what I stated which is that the whole thing is just to put another product out there to better the "image" of the company. I don't think you will see it do much. But that's just my opinion.

[Tracy Welles]

"That's retarded of course, because what is locked down in the SL Enterprise Workplace Store isn't copyright, and it isn't locked so that copyright can be protected; it's locked to create protectionism for one connected class of people."

Come on Prok, you wouldn't like it if you were having a meeting and flying penises flooded the sim. The fact is, these divisions, whether they work or not, should be done. They feel just as I do, which is why I moved to opensim behind a firewall. Nothing different here, there need be a separation and that is why Linden moved the pornsters to pornster islands. It only makes sense to me and I wish Linden would have done all this long ago.

[Prokofy Neva]

Tracy, you are obviously young and ignorant and inexperienced. Do you do anything besides teleport between worlds in your interoperability group or are you just an alt? You're obviously a typical asshole British hater of Americans, and that is usually a product of ignorance -- particularly blindness about your own government's similar positions. For example, raging about the U.S. getting into wars while seemingly heedless of the fact that the UK was right in their along with them, seemingly "knowing better". And prejudice against me for being an American, and assumption that I suppose these wars, which I don't. In fact, if anything, maybe the world needs to see how the Iran-Iraq war and the Russian-Afghanistan wars played out with no Western involvement, and see if their consciences could live with it. These are impossible issues to resolve and ignorant rantings about Americans going to war is just wilful petulance and moral blindness.

Your statements are all non-sequiturs. You're once again mixing up the need to have a free flow of products and people with the need to have a firewall. They can be combined simply by creating procedures. Not everything is decided by code. It's fine for companies to have firewalled sims, although it's not even really about penises from residents, it's about keeping their communications hidden *from Linden Lab itself*. That's obviously the biggest issue for them -- who needs to have all their business information in the hands of one omnipotent even if small company?!

My point about the penises is that the corporations who in fact ran these sims ran them poorly without even the basic security that a club or mall would have put on, even it were run by hired hands.

A club owner holding a wet t-shirt contest at a club would have routinely done more to lock down their sim from attacks than Daniel Terdiman from C-NET and Millions of Us did with their sim. THAT was the problem, ultimately.

I'm not for blaming the victim or blaming the lack of security as the primary problem, when griefers are the problem, and Linden Lab's negligence in dealing with them all these years instead of creating working groups with them and having brown-bag lunches with them. (That tactic is often taken by chicken-killers, who blame the deaths of chickens on people who won't lock down sims, rather than blaming it on themselves for their violence.)

But if the point is to claim all threats come from the resident population, here's an example where Daniel Terdiman, tech writer, couldn't turn on autoreturn or use estate ban efficiently before or during this attack, and MOU had not set it up so he could or had people present who could act quickly (or perhaps they were present and negligence, this is one of those topics debated to this day, as some darkly believe this was a conspiracy to discredit Anshe deliberately).

[Brinda Allen]

@LeVey Palou....RE: The Secondlife Dream...well said.

[Prokofy]

You know, it's interesting to note that while Amanda Linden spent five years at Organic with Kingdom, likely being his office wife practically, before that she was -- get this! -- at Mother Earth News. So she has this sort of green hippie cred that they love at the Lab. She conceived of leaving Organic as "leaving" marketing. And it's true. Because what they do at LL with their product there is less like marketing and more like propagandizing and like the Soviet active measures system.

Did you know there are facebook.com ads now for Second Life?! And when you click them, you go to a new website with new stuff, even newer than the black Hollywood Squares site.

[cube inada]

facebook with a landing page? that good news.

good. bring in new people and have linden pay for that.

thats why i pay them.

[Tracy Welles]

"Tracy, you are obviously young and ignorant and inexperienced. Do you do anything besides teleport between worlds in your interoperability group or are you just an alt? You're obviously a typical asshole British hater of Americans."

Ouch,

Now I know how Benjamin Duranske felt when trying to communicate with you.

You pegged me all wrong and slandered a fellow American. Not only that, everything you write is quite to the contrary.

Personal attacks will get you no where.

Have a great day. I'm sorry our communications will have to subside now, I won't be personally attacked just because this is your web site.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ouch right back at you sister.

If you don't want to be taken for a douche, don't behave like a douche.

If you don't want to sound like a typical British wanker American hater, don't.

If you don't want to sound young and stupid, don't.

Personal attacks are *all* that you understand.

Your original manner and tone is what evokes this from me, and will every time until you stop. Bye!