The Question About Second Life That Linden Lab Has Yet to Answer

Pictured: The Hilarious Hell Of The Second Life Noob Experience

Linden Lab answered nearly every reader question in response to my Ebbe Altberg interview recently, but there's one last follow-up to those follow-ups that they have yet to address:

Any plans for redoing the Viewer?

We are constantly revising, updating, and fixing the Viewer as with the rest of Second Life. There are no plans currently for a complete overhaul of the Viewer.

My question to that reply:

The vast majority of Second Life users don't even use the official SL viewer, while the vast majority of new users are so overwhelmed by that viewer, they quit on their first try. So what does Linden Lab have to lose by, say, hiring a UX developer who's a veteran of Apple or Maxis or another great design company, and totally revamping it?

I've asked that question twice, actually, but haven't yet received a reply. Maybe they're busy? But as Bob Schieffer once told Philip Rosedale and me, a non-answer is itself an answer.

Comments

[Better then Ezra]

# 1 they still never replied back about my question about changing the ancient land textures on the mainlands.

# 2 Linden Lab needs to reverse policy allowing 3rd party viewer to introduce new features.

# 3 Allow 3rd party viewers to redesign the linden viewer

# 4 For new residents access to all 3rd party viewers on sign-up letting new residents pick a viewer.

# 5 A new resident viewer designed by 3rd party viewer developers thats very intuitive, simple with a huge interactive help directory with built in link to 3rd party directory.

# 6 Allow great viewers like Cool VL Viewer back into the list, restore Lumiya!

# 7 Ebbe needs to remove all the terrible rules that crippled 3rd party viewer enthusiasm helping to make second life development a community effort again.

Certainly others have ideas were the lab went wrong and continues to do so and silence only points to hiding something.

[Pulsar]

About #6 I'd like more transparency.
Lumiya has been delisted from the TPV list by Oz Linden on Nov 3, 2017
http://wiki.secondlife.com/w/index.php?title=Third_Party_Viewer_Directory&diff=1206446&oldid=1206160
No explanation were given.
On Feb 17, 2018 someone in the forums reported that "Today it seems the creator's account has been banned" but as today Alina Lyvette's account looks active.
Then, recently, the viewer has been removed from Google Play too. The only cue is Google new policies and suspensions:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/04/improving-update-process-with-your.html
Lumiya creator still didn't answer to bloggers.
Reasons could be many. However, at this point I won't trust to run Lumiya, even less if downloaded from a 3rd party store.

[Potato King]

Here's a short reverse of my math.

Marketplace takes 5% out of every sale.

Lets say you're a merchant who pays rent on a small studio apartment in RL through SL Marketplace. So US $2000/month is your minimum.
That is 95% of $2105.26 - this is how much in sales you have to make. And that is just pretending for a moment that there was no fee on cashing out...

That's L$522,104.48

LL's takes $26105.23 - US $105.26

Now that might seem absurdly high. Especially for me - my shop gets about 1 sale a month because its not really a shop, but a space I enjoy.

But lets say you make skins, at L$1000 each. Plus 3 kinds of appliers for them for 150L each - that about a third of your skin customers buys.

So each sale averages L$1150 - rough 454 sales a month, or about 15 people per day.

Its pretty easy to find a lot of brands that have more than 15 sales a day.

Now if you also have a fashion line... and sell outfits at 300L each, or a combo-pack for 900L... and only a third of your customers buy the combo (I suspect most people buy the combo)... average sale of 500L... so now you need about 30 purchases a day.

But that is just me talking about people who make a living off of SL.

LLs doesn't care.

If I make about 1 sale a month, for about 150L. LLs still takes 8L from me. Consider that I am probably the rock bottom of merchants - because I'm not a merchant. Anyone who tries can likely do a lot better. Multiple this out by the number of shops in SL - it will start adding up very fast.

This is a much better economic model for LLs than land...

They could lose a thousand people like me and not care. But lose one Anshe Chung and the CEO's going to be in a very uncomfortable meeting with the board...

And as Marketplace has become successful - the revenue stream from it... logically exceeds anything that has been lost from land over the last few years.

Eventually Marketplace will hit a point of profit that LLs can safely ditch some of the land barons that have about 1/3 of what Chung has... and that is when tier might start dropping.

But also, the purpose of having land is not the same as it was before marketplace...

The primary purpose now is more or less the linden home or estate equiv.

Art venues - have no role in SL anymore. They are unfundable vanity projects. And sad as that might be - the low traffic on them morally justifies this as well: the actual people using SL day in and day out don't care about the loss of these places.

They filling other kinds of places now.

[Simple Lemon]

In the 35 plus years, I was an owner of three different successful software companies, my businesses upgraded our software used by our customers in both minor and major upgrades. When you have multi-million lines of code in your software applications for both the user interface and the backend applications this competitive requirement is how you create a great and financially successful software business. My companies competed in multiple markets with lots of competition and I cannot think of one single competitor of mine that did not do minor, major and full code rewrites to remain a market leader.

In the 15 years, I have been an almost daily user of Second Life, I have never seen a major update or full code rewrite of what we call Second Life by Linden Research. There have been thousands of minor updates almost always bug fixes, but the menu, build tools, backend problems, the LSL code seems to me to be very similar to what it was in January of 2004 when I started using Second Life.

Why is it like this? The answer is not simple. There is not one reason, there are many. But as a software industry veteran, I can point to the three reasons at the top of a long list of reasons why.

That first reason is the culture of Linden Research. The people in the topmost senior management of Linden Research from their limited or almost nonexistent use of Second Life have never seen or experienced on a sufficient scale any reason why Linden Research should expend the funds to give Second Life, both front end and back end code a major upgrade at least once a year.

The second reason is during the growth period of Second Life there was no competition to the Linden Research primary product and the Board of Directors began their “cash cow” policy of why spend money on something so silly and frivolous as this stupid “game” when there is no competition, and none of them on the board uses it and it provides them income that would only be reduced if capital funds were spent on upgrades. Hence, no major upgrades would be approved.

Third and most sadly the hardest to understand. Not all companies have good or even intelligent senior management. Some companies simply don’t connect with their customers or understand how to really stay on top. Think of it this way: Say that your company has forty-million registered users and your database has kept their contact information even if some of the email addresses are obsolete. And out of these forty-million registered users, you’re only getting maybe a half-million to log in regularly. Do you spend your capital funds to so greatly enhance your core brand name product that it gets huge new media attention and your marketing to your forty-million registered users garner, say 5% (two-million) of them to come back and try the totally new upgraded product? Or do you spend that same amount of capital funds and alienate your current half-million users and write a new technology and start from ground zero all over again.

After 35 years in the software business and meeting hundreds of successful technology company owners, I’m willing to say that almost everyone I have ever met would spend their money on a core brand name product huge upgrade revision and go after their old registered users instead of starting all over. This method has proven over and over to get the most results from new sales and additional revenue.

You can’t tell me it would be impossible to fully rewrite the current SL into a whole new world. I’ve done the impossible with my software companies code and I’ve competed with my competition who have one-upped my company with their impossible. But when you have a culture in a company where sales and new revenue seems to be the last thing on the agenda, well that is another story.

[Jake and the FatMan]

@ Lemon

"unfortunately you are talking to a divided company.If SL were its only product then of course everything would be concentrated there. But there is this Sansar thing, that secretly has priority, although of course this must never be said openly, because the favored product needs the lesser to survive. SL is the dumb sheep that is kept in a pretty pen and fed relatively well in the hope that it does not notice the slaughterer hovering in the background, or hear the constant grinding of the carving knives that, in very small almost unnoticeable ways, constantly removes thin slices of flesh from its bones. Let is not fool ourselves SL is the cash cow that is fed and watered to provide funding for the pathetic creature Sansar, that is nurtured on the blood of and life of the far superior sacrificial victim ."
"Posted by: JohnC | Thursday, April 25, 2019 at 03:44 AM"

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/04/linden-lab-ebbe-altberg-second-life-sansar.html

[tanya]

looks like lemon has got the right squeeze on the lab =)

[joan]

Yes, Lemon nailed that.

It's really difficult for most of us to understand a business model where a company strives to make money by discouraging growth and belittling their product.
That forty-million registered users are the people they hate most in the world.

[vwfan]

"That first reason is the culture of Linden Research. The people in the topmost senior management of Linden Research from their limited or almost nonexistent use of Second Life have never seen or experienced on a sufficient scale any reason why Linden Research should expend the funds to give Second Life, both front end and back end code a major upgrade at least once a year."

"Third and most sadly the hardest to understand. Not all companies have good or even intelligent senior management. Some companies simply don’t connect with their customers or understand how to really stay on top."

Sounds like deadwood employees. There's a Glassdoor review (https://bit.ly/2PVxn6N) on Linden Lab in regards to management that stated the following...

"Pay your people better. Love is not the answer and is easily abused.
Get rid of your deadwood much faster. You have a lot of it. Even if someone is skilled, if they aren't happy, they're not going to produce well. Recognize that quickly and fix the problem or get rid of them. Letting them hang around for years is toxic to them and the rest of the company."

[irihapeti]

tbf people mainly use TPVs for the added features/functions that TPVs provide. In plain UI terms the LL viewer is the cleanest less cluttered - it is the vanilla viewer

the second main reason people use TPVs over the LL viewer is that the LL viewer Texture Memory max. is still fixed at 512MB. Most TPVs have upped the slider limit allowing those with newer cards to take advantage of the extra RAM on their graphics cards. More allowable texture memory helps to reduce texture thrashing. On the list of annoying things, texture thrashing is up there with region crossings/teleport failures

[bufje]

I don't understand well what you say. sl client UI can be already redesigned by tpv, someone offer different ui to users, other no and simply add few extra commands. All the viewers are based on LL code, but many users use alternative viewers just thinking they are more safe and cool. And in anycase where is the problem? you want do your ui? simply do... or what you mean? Redo all the code for client and server? why?