Monat: April 2008

Dreamland woes

Today has been a rough day for Dreamland. Four long running Dreamland Angels have announced on the group „Dreamland citizens“ that they are going to quite their jobs soon.

Sahirah Hauptmann wrote:

Dear Dreamland Citizens,

It has been my pleasure working for you the past 2 years helping you all to the best of my abilities, but I’m sad to say that will no longer be the case. I’ve chosen to tender my resgination I’ll be leaving the company on April 30th.

I wish you all the best.

Sincerely,

Sahirah Hauptmann

Former Dreamland Angel

MadMarkus Miles wrote:

following a few of my colleagues I herewith need to inform you, that today has been my last day as Dreamland Angel.

PLease enjoy your second life and many many thanks for your patience, your kindness and your love, given to me.

Best regards,

MadMarkus Miles

Sal Salubrius wrote:

I have only been here a short time I know, but I have grown to love you all. There are irreconcilable differences between me and the management and I feel that I need to move on. I am still available to tie up any loose ends for you all in any way I can untill the end of the month.

Regards, Sal Salubrius

At least one another popular angel, Master Quatro, has been rumored to leaving, too. So at least three angels told that they left or are going to leave on one day. This leaves us to the question: what’s in the bush?

Seems they are going to charge their customers in the future money for things that are right now still available for free, like restarting a sim, according to MadMarkus Miles. Also planned is that you get a tier rebate after a buy first in the next month, not in the actual month and for sure there are more things in the pipeline.

What does that mean? Since you cannot make a living on selling land alone anymore big landowners are now going to install other schemes of making money in world, that’s it and it seems not all angels agreed on this plan of action and this is why they left. Quite simple actually.


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New CEO Mark Kingdon alias „M Linden“ – soon new CTO?

Founder Philip Rosedale has announced today that after about one month the search for a new CEO is over – it is going to be Mark Kingdon, in world name M Linden.

He’s going to start May 15th, has a background in arts, business and economics and has been working at bigger companies. His main focus? Better in world stability, user experience and reliability. He’s also got quite much experience in international companies, which might help Lindenlab too, since they have an international audience.

Sounds like very good news to me, seems it’s easier for Lindenlab to find a new CEO than a new CTO, though, but perhaps since this one is settled a new CTO will follow shortly…

A more in depth portrait of Mark Kingdon can be found here.


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Riding the wave or getting lost under it

In business, like almost everywhere else, it’s either riding the wave or getting lost when it waves above you. Making a revolution or suffering a revolution.

Lindenlab for long has been riding the wave. Now, that the hype has somewhat gone, it needs to establish Second Life as a more stable platform than it is today, because the competition like OpenSim is catching up and up more and getting stronger. It still has its advantages above other platforms, but needs to communicate those more.

In her latest long essay long running citizen Gwyneth Llewelyn asks about if bad communication practice is the root of all evil, let’s just say for short, she’s got some valid points. Communication has flown to other kind of meanings, it’s still there, but needs to be polished up.

Another main problem she’s raising is Lindenlab’s missing to produce a roadmap and their inability to work out and work on timelines. That’s quite serious stuff.

One of the main problems with SL today is that it doesn’t really scale very well. This problem has already been known about the last two years and shows up everyday more and more when a certain avatar threshold of concurrent logins has been met.

The technic behind Second Life has some bottlenecks and shortcomings. Think about it as an analogy like a Ferrari powered by a lawn mower engine. Looks good and all shiny, but cannot deliver the promised power. Yuck.

What Lindenlab has got to do is to build a new engine, that’s hard enough, but also to put it in the car while it’s running, and that’s quite a hard feature to achieve. We’ll see if it ever happens or not.


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Login worries

Some days ago there’s been the news that IBM is going to build their own server farm with the Second Life server side on it.

Well, frankly said, I can understand them. That convoluted mess that Second Life today is is all but a worthwile investment if you’re a company. If you want to have a good experience with it, better stay away from the main grid and build your own farm, your own island.

If you’re thinking about investing in SL, better do it when the grid has more stabilized. At the moment this would just be a great waste of money in my opinion given the bad performance all inhabitants of Second Life have been experiencing since months now.


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