indeed, a safe theory eh? viable alternatives at much lower price, full ownership of all of your assets, your own TOS, privacy, etc

coupled with lackluster media coverage now versus 4 years ago

yes, SL’s value is less and not so theoretical imo

SL and Britney Spears, both were popular in their day . . .

The well known core problem of LL is the fact that newbies don’t stay in SL. Being sarcastic one could say that LL already reached the goal “fast” as most newbies don’t even stay a week.

Nothing that LL did since the return of Phil targets this problem. Things only got less complex for LL but not for the users.

To the contrary LL canceled the Community Gateway (CG) Programm – the only project that aimed to help newbies managing their first days in SL.
I admit that the CG program wasn’t a full success. Though some gateways performed really well other gateways did nothing but make newbies leave SL as fast as possible.
This could have been easily changed. The CG program had strict quality guidelines but LL never enforced them. For some reason LL canceled the whole program instead of kicking only the gateways with bad performance. For some reason LL canceled their last way of teaching newbies SL without even announcing any alternative.

As long as newbies don’t stay in SL, as long as newbies are teleported to some handpicked but completly non-newbie-places where they are simply lost in cyberspace LL won’t reach the goal of more users no matter how hard they try.

But, is LL trying hard at all? Are there any projects to attract more users now or at least announced for the NEAR future?
Nope, well, hmmm, maybe the meshes. But if one compares how nice SL could look like today if everyone had taste and would use state of the art stuff to how ugly most parts of SL are in fact I doubt the the impact on the average SL will be visible soon.
So lets say there is a project to pimp some parts of SL (most likely those which already look nice and state of the art) but nothing else.

So is LL cutting costs? Definitly!

Is LL trying to prevent newbies from leaving SL faster than they registered for it? No, at least no one knows about it.

Is LL trying to make more users registering for SL? No, at least no one knows about it.

Is LL making plans for a better future? No, at least no one knows about it.

Is downsizing without starting or annoucing projects which promise a future growth an optimized way to attract potential investors? No.

So LL is simply cutting costs without providing solutions for their most urgent problems at the same time.

Conclusion:
LL is cutting costs in a way that looks rather desperate and not future-oriented or buyer-oriented as LL doesn’t anncounce any solutions for their core problems so far.

Best Ice²

Anonymous Architect, nobody cares about the concurrency of how many avatars can get on one sim, or 4 sims. That’s one of those geek affectations used to sneer at SL, as if whatever caper Open Sim/Unity/whatever does is in fact any better *really*. Most people simply have no need for this feat. They socialize with far less than 40 on a sim, and they are perfectly happy to go to 4-sim music events. It’s not at the top of the list of user demands.

As for overall concurrency, the problem now isn’t that it is straining at the seams and the Lindens can’t scale it, the problem is that it is down and less than what they can hold. And they have put in various new technologies that in fact have enabled them to do more, I wonder if you are keeping up.

We are speculating that Linden Lab is going to be sold to some third party because of all the due diligence paperwork shuffling going on.

Has it occurred to anyone that instead of selling to some third party they may be planning to sell but by doing an IPO on the stock market?

Which means LL will still be LL just it will be a public company instead of private. About time I say.

There are tons of people who like to roleplay but it gets kind of boring (at least for me) when the roleplay basically means dress up and pretend. I want to be able to interact with a lot of NPCs and shoot them!

To keep newbies coming back we also need something that has a LOT of NPCs. The platform currently just doesn’t support NPCs except client-side which are serious resource hogs. We need Server Side Bot capability to be able to eat the lunch of WoW or other competing MMORPGs.

LL seem to dress nice for a buyer. LL did this with employee cut-offs, ToS changes, adult politics, as well as with hiring M Linden for the dirty part of the work.

And, why Microsoft?
They have the name, Bob and its a nice start to lift up the discussion around the sale. So LL letting the info ooze out that “Microsoft is interested in buying LL” helps to lift the price somewhat.
But nothing more. Someone could lift some more names in the light over the next month. Have i just heard IBM?

Atm the world finance crises might be still a bit too annoying and some additional sale preparations have to be done by the LL.
Also the fresh Gartners ‘Hype Cycle’-report http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1447613 might give LLs sale-wishes some tail wind too, even if it notes a long way to go for ‘public virtual worlds’.

So yes, I am with Dusan on this ‘not yet’…

How can it be that Linden Lab finds itself in this current state of reality and predicament? Alternatively, the entire problem holding SL back from solid and sustained growth might have been solved by focusing on the task of fixing the codebase’s inability to handle increased concurrency.

It is limited concurrency at an implemented codebase level, which is the root cause of Second Life’s stagnation and limited ability to host compelling social interactions versus other online services. This problem continues to restrict all other successive flow-on benefits and innovations that might have otherwise added increased value to the company and Second Life as a whole – if only, Linden Lab were able to provide a service capable of managing crowds of avatars in a scene with reasonable performance as its ‘principle’ virtual world experience, and its number one priority.