My point in listing out different options for strategy wasn’t to advocate for them, but to make the point that HAVING a strategy results in trade-offs, focus and a communication and marketing plan. The lack of one means making patchwork efforts to please diverse constituencies including internal ones. I’m no strategist, but I think about the Balanced Scorecard approach to corporate strategy and am reminded that it asks companies to make decisions about things like cost versus price, and internal versus external perspectives. Linden, I think, places far too much focus on internal groups than external ones, priding itself on the Tao or whatever it is, and the idea that treating its employees like innovation engines is the key to its growth – let the coders gravitate to projects that appeal to THEM. Tweaking the strategic emphasis to a more tightly structured user focus within a broader strategic framework seems to me to be long overdue.

So my examples were merely meant to illustrate that if you have a strategy, some actions and emphasis sort of falls away. So, take the concurrency strategy – while I realize there are limitations, if Linden decided its main goal was to get as many people in world as it could, I’d bet that they’d end up spending a lot less time on rendered shadows and a lot more time on light clients. I can’t remember which of the platforms at the VW conference was touting its parallel worlds? Basically being able to access their grid through both a “heavy” client and a Flash-based thin client – and the world looks completely different to each user group. One was full 3D and the other translated those 3d objects into 2D Habbo-like rooms.

Likewise the “host your own Grid” strategy – take a direction like that and you start investing in how to split the asset servers off into separate little mini asset hosts. I’m not a techie, but the idea of placing the assets closer to the sims on which they appear strikes me as worth looking at – perhaps to the point where a school or immersive sim could even deliver their assets on a CD so they preload to your computer.

Regardless, each of the strategies I outlined were just hypotheticals – the point being that if you HAVE a strategy then your decision-making process starts to feel a lot less, um, organic (sorry M) than it does now. You wouldn’t have these arguments with Torley over rendered shadows because you’d be able to say “Yeah, but rendered shadows are a barrier to our 100M avatar goal, let’s focus on a Flash-based client instead.”

As for bots. Hmmm. They’re resource-sucking and evil. They also make no sense to me – for 100L a day, is someone getting rich off these things? or is it the thrill of gaming the system?

But I do think that somewhere in the course of the next year or two that bots, whether in SL or elsewhere, will start to have more productive functions. I’m thinking NPCs I guess, for training, help, whatever – or my more idealized version of bots that are information gathering machines, kind of like spiders, roaming the Grid, accessing databanks of rich information and 3D visualization engines and shipping that data back to a dashboard.

Road maps for governance, zoning, all that stuff is critical. I’d still propose however that they fall under a strategic statement or purpose in order that those individual road maps are within a broader, coherent mission.

2. Tekkies argue vigorously about whether you can even tell if an account logging on is a bot or not — I maintain that you can, by its patterns of behavior and speech, but maybe this isn’t so easily automated. But I think the log-on routines through the use of bots from libsl probably have recognizable patterns

3. Even if you got rid of 10 percent or even 20 percent of the bots, that wouldn’t necessarily help the problem — because people aren’t logging on because they get turned away or lag out all the time — there are only 45,000 logging on at times when there could be 66,000.

4. I’m told there is a ceiling on concurrency but I just don’t know as LL may not wish to tell us, although we can note they have steadily pushed this upwards over the years.

But assume there is then…why not reducing camping and bots? They are free accounts that consume platform resources.

Is it because LL is scared that elimnating camping with flaten the concurrency? My guess is that 25% of SL concurrency is campers! (Hope i am wrong btw)…camping also creates cashflow to accounts that in turn buy things (and not enough from us). So impact of dealing with Camping is significant, but it is also a defining point for the future of LL/SL.

Anyone whose empire has grown along with the Lindens has been finding it collapsing for a year now.

Raw numbers of sign-up and growth for growth’s sake has to be abandoned for more concentration on retention and higher-quality user experiences, as well as enabling of lighter use for those without graphic card ability and broadband.

I thought you were more of a liberal than you appear to be with this harsh and Darwinian socialist plan.

Try to think a bit about Soviet giantism and “virgin lands” collectivism, or for that matter, if you’d rather bash American, think of American suburban sprawl.

Either of these models constitute “growthism,” that is, that profits or “betterness” can only come from growth, endless growth, moving from glory to glory. But of course, growth needs to be sustained, and there isn’t any plan for that, from the Lindens, or in your quick-impact list.

1. We may be at a hard concurrency ceiling of 65,000 that just can’t get better — perhaps that’s as many servers as you can scale on one grid with one central asset server — and that’s it. There are material limitations even to virtual things, and maybe that’s it for now — and the future consists of a lot of loosely connected grids.

Stressing out the system to shoehorn 100,000 concurrency strikes me as draconian and harsh, as it is not likely to get any more stable and will only be achieved at overfulfilling norms, Stakhanovite labour, etc. (sorry for the Soviet metaphors, but they fit).

2. Your notion that LL should just “sell 10 million islands and get out, let users grab their sims” sounds awfully can-do and tekkie, but is ignorant of the realities of the average user, even land baron with a continent. Most people cannot run server farms — they do not have the infrastructure, the maintenance capacity, the T-1 lines, etc. etc. Most people would be unlikely to run even one server. Even if they could rent from other people who then get into the server farm business, that opens up new problems. So while some enthusiastic geeks may do this, the average person will give up and go to some managed world — and the Lindens, failing to find a business model as all those freed sims go hook up on somebody else’s grid, will try to maintain some sort of collective, with a mainland and constellation of islands.

3. All kinds of other factors could happen — telecoms suddenly building more broadband and making it cheaper, or scarcity of broadband and telecoms cracking down on virtual world downloading, or politicians cracking down on a proliferation of own-hosted sims which present a regulation nightmare to them. So don’t bet on your plan to take place in a vacuum.

4. This obsession with interoperability is a chimera. SL would likely do better protecting IP and the integrity of the economy, and let all those other Wonderland and Forterra type platforms interoperate to their heart’s content if it’s so important to them. I would predict that business use even of virtual worlds that they can utterly control and have “interoperability” with simply will not graft into business culture as fast as other developments like increased capacity of mobile phones and video blogging. What makes virtual worlds interesting isn’t their virtuality, but their world. Making a Maya type program or a Sims 2 available for interactivity has its uses but without community and content and an economy, it’s just an add-on.

It’s interesting to see RightasRain go off on the Lindens, after all the feting they have done with him, constantly putting him on the front page. I don’t think the splash screen should go to resident activities because it would be more unfair even than the very unfair Showcase, where Greenies has reined for months and months. The log-on should only be for Linden-sponsored public events.

I’m always puzzled by this obsession with saving content offline. There aren’t any virtual worlds that enable you to do this. Oh, sure, if you make a texture in Photoshop, you save it on your hard-drive. But what use is a 3-D chair made to fit the scale and look and physics of Second Life on some other platform?

The fact is, for five years now, the Lindens have kept the content on the Internet, safe from loss from your own computer’s crashes — that’s how I see it. Sure, they lose inventory. But what’s remarkable is how much they save and how it is there on demand, available for individual creativity or group collaboration. There’s nothing to say that an XYZ prim sort of structure is optimal for building worlds. Other platform will not have prim-based building — so why fuss about the ability to back up a complex SL build done in prims?

I think the Lindens need a completely different roadmap about completely different things.

o Governance — the Lindens have made virtually no improvements in their very limited and very abusive and arbitrary governance systems — and they need to change drastically — Lindens should adopt a firm position of not becoming involved in inter-resident disputes whatsoever, unless they violate real-life laws such as fraud or child pornography. The Lindens need to develop more robust police blotter reporting, a more sophisticated ombudsmen system with residents/Linden interaction on tough cases or issues; my God, if Even Online can have player governance over minerals and starships, the Lindens can surely put in at least some rudimentary advisory council for people who invest real money in the platform that would be more fair than “SL Views” and other FIC groups.

o Zoning — only rabid ideological extremism keeps the Lindens from zoning — when they are ready to bite the bullet on this they will both reduce inter-resident friction and increase value and business for themselves and others — even a mere division into “residential” and “commercial” by physical continent layout would make a world of difference

o Forums should be restored, permabans reversed, and this ridiculous long tail of 150 comments on blog posts — rarely answered — ceased in favour of announcements only without comments — put up a disclaimer of liability for resident expression the way every other online news site does, and tell residents who are easily offended that they can avail themselves of real-life lawyers and libel laws should they feel the need

o Robust inworld state (Linden)radio that sells ad spots, that everyone can put on their land to add more inworld media and coherent and civilization-building

o Sell ads at the welcome areas on kiosks, signs, billboards — get over the allergy against advertising by encouraging it where the eyeballs are really there, and regulating it where they are not (pristine waterfront ruined by ad extortionists)

The user-made and user-traded content model works. People like it, they like being able to share their imagination with others, like having control over their own content whether they decide to gift it or sell it, they like shopping in a virtual world. User content is intrinsic to the land market too, kill one you kill the other. In short, IT WORKS and it’s paying SL’s bills right now, something the freetard developers keep forgetting. So keep it, strengthen it, extend it and, most-of-all, build a 100 metre wall around it and fast. Second Life should be a walled garden of unearthly delights.

On the other hand enterprise, education and some businesses need interoperability, scalability, open-source code, the ability to host their own sims. So give them that. The Grid should be the wider, open-sourced, interoperable platform and SL should be a walled garden within it.

We’re essentially already there but the mud in the water is the status of SL content in this wider grid. Clear the mud, give content-makers in SL the opportunity to flag their content as ‘transportable’ meaning it is allowed to leave the confines of SL and move to a wider Grid. Anything not marked as transportable STAYS in SL and Linden fight to keep it there (or else).

Why can’t we have the best of both virtual worlds?

Much to radical and easy to say from our perspective of course – but hypothetically it would give investors, developers and users a focuspoint – and LL some measurable, visible milestones to rekindle outside interest (hopefully in a more sane manner than we’ve seen in 2006) rather than to slowly strangle it with community mis-management and (or due to) lack of a clear message to the outside world