You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I’ll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Linden Lab have done some pretty curious things recently, and it’s all happening whilst the grid is experiencing hours of downtime and restricted performance.
I’ve seen so many blog posts and forum threads from SL users proclaiming “Fix stuff, dammit!” as they bemoan Linden Lab for their ventures in the market, rather than focusing on grid stability.
I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark here, but I’m guessing that LL doesn’t make the grid unstable for kicks, despite what my numerous parodies may suggest. Essentially, they have several teams over in LL, and they all work on different parts of the Second Life experience to make sure that not only does it work, but that it remains cutting edge and a market leader.
Although the rest of us might be waiting for a more stable grid with more cool toys to turn up, the guys at Linden Lab have their jobs to think of, and they need to fix/maintain the grid and innovate concurrently, or else they’re going to lag behind their rivals.
And I can appreiciate that, and why they continue to spread out and work on new aspects to the grid. But really, I do wonder about the timing of some of these announcements – as customers, grid stability is paramount to us.
The problem to me, therefore, is that Linden Lab is failing on their communication matrix. This matrix requires them two know two things – what they’re good at, and what is important to us – the customers.
To do that, Linden Lab has to monitor their customer base through blogs and forums to find out what the customers like, don’t like and what they do well, or just completely fail at. They score a comfort zone because we’re all already customers who fill their pockets, and because we’ve invested in them, they easily run the risk of alienating us too.
Lets take the first aspect of this model – The Good and Important (Neo)
FJ Linden has taken to posting Grid Updates to inform the customers of the state of the grid, what’s been done to improve and what they’ll be doing to improve it further. I don’t think many people deny that performance and stability are at the top of resident’s list for matters concerning the metaverse, and FJ addresses this on a regular basis.
Another is the contribution of Windlight to Second Life. The fact is, Linden Lab did a good job with Windlight in bringing in a professional team to handle it and implementing it smoothly.
Mono would be another good example of this, as would Havoc4. They all served purposes which improved important aspects of Second Life in the way of aesthetics, functionality and content creation.
They do this promotion without bragging about how wonderful they are, simply because we’d collectively murder them. Not to say that we don’t anyways, but we’re not as bad as could be.
They also tend to repeat the same message to us, again and again – strategic repetition helps their message sink in to us, and the majority of what we hear from the Lab falls into this category.
The Bad and Important (Agent Smith)
This would cover all the things which Linden Lab aren’t good at, but that us, their customers, care about.
Well take your pick – Inventory Loss, Grid Stability, Openspaces, Performance, Transaction issues, building issues.. the list of what Linden Lab are failing at is pretty long. But these are all things which are high priority importance to us, but have failed to be rectified for years.
But these are things which it is essentially useless for FJ Linden to be updating us on.. we don’t care about what you’re planning to do. We want it done, and done yesterday. After so many years on instability, we’re bored of hearing about things you’re going to do. We don’t care about what you’ve already done either – the grid is still unstable and until it works properly, people aren’t going to care about what you did.
Basically – fix the problems.
When a clothing manufacturer makes a t-shirt which bleeds colours in the wash, they fix the fault before selling on more.
The worst sin that Linden Lab commits here is bad communication. They should never try to spin their way out of a problem – all companies suffer these types of issues. LL needs to be transparent about them with us, the customers, address them frankly as they’ve now started doing in blogposts.
Most importantly – correct the problems.
Good and Unimportant (Spoon Boy)
Second Life have aspects which are great, which ultimately they don’t matter much.
Katt Linden’s been posting about some of the positive aspects of Second Life – education, design and culture. These are nice aspects of Second Life which help to enhance the virtual world experience and raise its profile in world, but really we don’t find them overly important.
These are also topics that Linden Lab shouldn’t dwell on too much – they’re nice to see, but when we’re demanding answers on so many other questions, things like this only serve to frustrate us.
The Bad and Unimportant (Persephone)
This covers all the things which are bad, but that we the customers don’t really care much about.
Things like the “First Hour Resident Experience” that Linden Lab keeps pressing on about. We don’t care about that – we just want a grid that works for those of us who are already here!
Linden Lab recognised that most people who signed up don’t seem to stick around. They used this as something of a confession and worked to implement a new homepage, and working on this new First Hour scheme.
The current fiasco surrounding their purchases of marketplaces is also related – a better search isn’t a pressing issue for most residents, as things like X-Street SL provided the service for us to find goods and products. By diverting resident’s attention to this, rather than fixing the recent grid troubles first, they made a faux-pas in trust with their customer base.
Essentially, Linden Lab needs to address their Agent Smith problems before feeding us the Persephone issues.
Take The Red Pill
Linden Lab needs to sort out how they communicate with residents, and some recent steps have shown that they are beginning to do that. They need to clarify what they’re good at and what they’re not, and what’s important to us as users and what is not.. once they address the issues properly, they can regain our trust.
Dale Innis on January 22, 2009
I think there’s quite a bit more diversity among us as users than your post would imply. You think Windlight was good and important; there are people who (vociferously) think it was bad and/or a complete waste of time. You don’t find education, design, and culture overly important, and you don’t care about the first hour experience; I think education, design, and culture are quite important (more important than Windlight, for instance, although I’m not a Windlight-hater), and I think the first hour experience is pretty key in keeping new people coming in, and fixing some of SL’s external perception problems.
As another example, I agree that grid stability is important, but I suspect we differ on how important it is to improve it over how it is now (or, okay, over how it was two weeks ago before the current rash of problems); I can live with a certain amount of instability if it means that SL will do a better job at staying at the leading edge of the field in terms of the features and functions that it provides to us. The “no new features until all the bugs are fixed!” folks, also perfectly legitimate Residents, feel differently.
Different residents, different groups of residents, have very different interests and priorities. We can’t really complain that SL isn’t addressing what’s important to us users, as if we speak for all users; the resident population is much more diverse than that.
I agree, though, that Resident communications hasn’t been their strong suit. Whatever priorities they end up putting on various problems and actions, as a result of all the different forces that they are pushed and pulled by, they need to announce and explain those actions with clarity, and with sensitivity to how all the various kinds of Residents will be impacted. And they haven’t done a really good job at that…
Eve Petlyakov on January 22, 2009
This is great Prad…
I *do* think it’s a good idea to give new users a better orientation…but at this point I’m not hot on having them stick around. When online users soar into the 80 and 90 THOUSANDS and the grid freezes up and servers are overloaded and LL shuts down logins. Well yeah. Do we *want* new users around at this point?
QueenKellee Kuu on January 22, 2009
Prad, you make no sense. First you say LL needs to communicate, then you say when LL does communicate about what they are doing the fix the problem you say you don’t care and are tired of it of their communications. And when they tell you about the many ways ppl use Second Life, you really don’t care. oookkaay…
I think all you want to do is hear yourselves bitch, honestly.
Think you tune out LL? I try to mostly tune out this constant whiney talk. (Failing here, obviously) There’s honestly not a productive thing you suggest for a solution except to communicate better (except, then, you don’t care what they say) Oh, and that we should all listen to what YOU SAY is important, screw education and culture and how to actually grow this community and keep it alive and kicking with new people. I completely disagree on what you think is important. So who’s right?
And Why Oh Why is buying Xstreet and OnRez already a fiasco? Because the same people who always hate everything that LL does says so? The same people that threw unholy fits about windlight coming, and havok 4, and mono (yes, they were all hated on when they were first announced)?
Terry T on January 22, 2009
Proving Dale’s comment that we are a mixed bag, I disagree with Queen in that Prad is just bitching. He provided good and bad, important and unimportant, rather than just railroading LL (and hey, sometimes it’s OK to be an engineer narrowing in on Bessy).
Generally speaking, it’s cool to see that education and other venues are using the platform, but it’s natural for people to be unhinged if we’re hearing about it when there are a lot of other problems. Consider if a restaurant is a mess and the chef bakes a cake for everyone- the cake is nice, yes, but it doesn’t clean up in the place. In fact, it probably makes more dish towers.
I see their being opportunity in improving the stability of the grid and still being a forerunner in the market, though. What can they do to streamline things? If we can have progressively smaller cell phones that do more, is it possible to have a more efficient, less costly server system that can support more global users? To me, exploring that has potential for multiple parties being happy.
Express Zenovka on January 22, 2009
I’m going to have to piggy back off what Dale Innis said. As you’ve pointed out before, there are hundreds of thousands of active users and what is important to you isn’t important to all of them. Education and culture are *huge* to some people in Second Life, much more important that you give them credit for. I know more about the educational side because I spent a year doing work for an educational institution in SL, but consider the following few points.
Take a peek at the SLED lists (http://www.sl-educationblog.org/) to see how many educators are currently using Second Life and whose basic purpose in SL is see how they can convey knowledge to students better. Furthermore, for these educators the “first hour experience” is crucial. Its the difference between letting your students each create their own account or making an account for them and directing them to the Orientaton area you had to purchase and make for them to make sure they knew how to make the most of the your class. Or, its the difference between your department head accepting that Second Life is a viable platform for virtual world exploration or a dumb idea that can be written out of the budget for next term.
The culture side of things is an attempt to make SL appeal to a broader audience. These cultural facets — which may not be your thing — might be the reason some person thinks to themselves “Oh, hey. Second Life has ? Maybe I should try to check it out?”
Just because it doesn’t appeal to you (or you haven’t seen/heard it before) doesn’t mean it isn’t important to someone. LL wants SL to appeal to as many people as it can — the SLGrid site is a clear indication of this. I have no proof, but I’d suspect that those educational and corporate-sponsored sims in SL provide more stable/reliable income to LL than we as the “average user” do. It would actually be in LL’s best interests, then to work on features that crowd wants as well. In fact, I see that most of your Spoon Boy and Persephone issues should be merged into the the previous two sections.
Wow, I really rambled.. and I have no clue if that made any sense. At least I didn’t do it in 160 word increments I guess >.>
Katoria on January 22, 2009
<3 The Matrix references!
Landsend Korobase on January 22, 2009
Prad’s right (he usually is). What’s the point of culture, education, and all the other fancy meta-things, if there isn’t a stable grid to do it on? How can you actually enjoy those things if you can’t log in?
Sure he’s got some of his personal priorities coming through in the post, but his view represents one of the most professional and productive people on the grid. His view is no more “irrelevant” than anyone elses, but it is based on more experience and experiences than I (at the least) have had in-world. And that makes it worth listening to.
If you disagree with him QueenKellee, you think you could do it in a calm adult way clearly responding to his points? Cause you do realise the way you wrote your response reflects worse on you than him…
Park Blame on January 22, 2009
I have to agree with Terry and disagree with QueenKellee… Prad’s stating both the good and bad things, and hasn’t just trashed Linden Lab here. I think you’re just reading it as any other blog entry ranting at LL.
And he’s right – grid stability IS the most important thing. What good is education, culture and bringing in new people if the grid keeps falling apart and logins are shut down?
Alexandra Daikon on January 22, 2009
Pretty good post, though I have to disagree with some things.
One would be windlight. Second Life’s graphics etc are so extreme the average computer person cannot use it, I know I can’t. I had to downgrade to pre-windlight just to get a few extra FPS. Honestly- making the grid look pretty is not important at all when you have issues such as grid stability. Before windlight, the grid was somewhat unstable, and since windlight things have gone down hill. Part of it has to do the rapid increase in population, along with many other things. Yes, many new people don’t stay in SL, and honestly I think it’s because of the lag you have with windlight (their computers aren’t good enough to handle it well) plus the recent more-than-normal instability. I honestly think half the people that die-hard love windlight wouldn’t care if it was gone as long as things were fixed. So on the scale of 1 to 10 of windlight importance- I’d give it a 3. Fix things first then add the pretty.
Second- education and culture and art *is* what SL is all about. What would SL be without the art? the education? the places to explore with your friends? It’s not a killing game- so that’s out. It’s a social game, and one created by the users- SL would *not* be the same without all these things and so importance level is around a 7.
Third- grid stability. Even with a super awesome puter, you can’t do the education, art, exploring if you can’t even move or get kicked off every 5 min (or even are unable to get on the grid in the first place). You said it was important and I have to agree. This gets a rating of 10 for importance.
Fourth- Communication. I honestly don’t think it’s nearly as important as you’re making it out to be. Yes, they need to work on stop telling us the same damn thing- but would their communication skills really bother us if the grid was stable etc? No, probably not. If they fixed the grid they can keep their horrible communication skills. Do what your customers are paying you to do. Communication gets a 6/7.
Great post. I do agree with you on some things but harshly on others. Just remember that people don’t always think like you, and you should really take into account those opinions as well.
Honour on January 22, 2009
Well thought out post Prad – and it would be surprising if everybody agreed with everything……and since it’s his blog, I don’t think he has to take anybody else’s opinions into account
…..
I will say that if you want to appeal to the active “gamer” or person used to great 3d graphics, you’d better work on things like Windlight. Keeping your platform/graphics etc. at the level used by those with small and/or old systems, or those with poor connections, won’t get you far from a competitive or growth perspective.
I agree that education/culture/charitable initiatives are vital. They are also endeavours which could/should be built/developed/and maintained by the residents passionately involved in them. Providing the tools and a (hopefully) stable platform would be LL’s responsibility.
My own 2 cents about the recent purchase – I remember being an active seller on eBay when they first tried competing with PayPal and then finally bought it. Competing with PayPal was a useless and eventually failed experiment which diverted resources and alienated many. At least LL has skipped the middle step and just gone directly to purchase. It seems to make sense from the perspective of their business model and I think it was inevitable.
just saying
Jdtrue Writer on January 23, 2009
Well said! reading a lot of blogs you can see people dont get the concept that LL has diffrent teams working on stuff. They seem to all think that when there is a gid problem they should all come rushing in to help.
You are 100% right about the timing of some of these announcements. a Post about how that last weakend was full of problems to the next post was we just got SLX and Onrez.
Now the new SLX and Onrez thing may just proven to be the biggest problem LL will have in the end. Only people haveing billing problems care about billing problems, Only people with fast enough Vid cards care about Windlight, Only builders care about building problems, only people that own opensims care about open sims…. But everyone shops or sells or shops and sells. when they called the fact that Onrez vendors would be goin in 3 weeks with SLX not ready for them as just a “hole”. That there was problems in other parts of the company or they did not look at what they were buying.
Bailey Longcloth on January 23, 2009
I have to agree with Honour, since this is Prad’s blog, they are his opinions and he really doesn’t need to take into consideration anyone elses.
I happen to agree with Prad, without grid stability, nothing else really matters. If you can’t login you can’t shop, sell, build, educate, take pics, DJ, perform live music, or socialize. It won’t matter if your PC can’t handle windlight because you can’t log in. It won’t matter that LL bought Xstreet and Onrez because you won’t be able to get inworld delivery.
I know there are multiple teams at LL working on many projects and I’m sure they are working on grid stability and I rarely complain about the job they are doing. After a difficult week/weekend of disabled logins, in world issues etc though it’s hard to not complain a bit.
Just my 2 cents.