The barriers are far worse than you state, even after you jump through those legal hoops.

As your content gets onto that grid, you have ZERO IP RIGHTS. The admin of the SLEek grid can reassign all perms on everything you create as soon as they import it to their grid. What can you do about that? Nothing. You, as content creator, won’t even have ACCESS to their priavte grid, so how will you know?

Marketing via the new SLE Marketplace to these corp grids is going to be a full-perms one-shot give-away. The instant they buy it from you, there is no control for your rights. They can change all permissions, copy indefinitely, and even cross-load it to other SLEek grids that they own. And you can’t do squat about it.

The barrier to Content Providers is immense. You can’t even package your product for sale to them unless you own an EMPTY REGION that you can prepare it in. How many content creators have a spare sim lying around? Not many. And I certainly don’t see LL offering a staging area for you to drop your merchandise on for packaging.

In other concerns… The license fee is $55K USD up front, which includes a license for only 100 accounts. Not concurrent users, but individually named Accounts. Additional accounts cost more, even though the server is ready and waiting to serve 800 concurrent users and an unspecified number of created accounts. There will be at least one annual fee for account levels, stated as “$175 USD per account per year, with discounts for volume.”. So the 100 base accounts presumably will cost $17,500 USD per year to maintain, as a licensing fee. And no one is saying publicly what the rates are for additional users, either the first year or in subsequent years. Got a corp with 90,000 users? God help you in the licensing fees, for a tool that most of your users will rarely use. We aren’t talking about an application that most Corp employees would use on a daily basis here. Not with the limitations it has on it, of only 800 concurrent users across a max of 8 sims, with zero expansion capability.

http://lalotelling.blogspot.com/2009/11/loose-ends.html

I’d predict there will also be a massive problem with the foolish decision to try and maintain a select list of content creators. LL is just not very good at bureaucracy and its hard to imagine a system that would require more bureaucratic effort than pre-approved products from pre-approved creators.

Agreed. While the pricing is reasonable and most firms and universities can certainly afford it, I think after the initial investigations many operators may decide that the advantages of SL Enterprise don’t justify the extra price, and consider the public Second Life or an OpenSim installation.

I understood what you tried to say, Flo, and when i put all things together i think, that there is the fear that LL should put more effort in improving the performance of Sl instead of focusing on other products like SLE. In one way i agree with that, but on the other hand i think, that every new product (or concept) can help the Main Grid as well. Maybe it needs time, maybe users and companies which are using SLE give feedback and help in this way to improve SL.

But one thing is for sure: all in all SLE will help to increase the acceptance of using virtual worlds generally. So it becomes more and more »natural« – no matter how you plan to use a virtual environment. for business, for entertainment – its up to you.

And that is what i like.

hugs.