While I 100% believe a shitty company would do this if it benefitted them, I just don’t see how SL warrants the effort. It doesn’t make enough to be sexy to pillaging. All its tech and assets are outdated. Its not really a serious competitor for...well, anything. Honestly, it’s cheaper just to let LL continue to mismanage it into complete oblivion.
But that's not how modern business works.
While I am well acquainted with the utter insanity of many corporate growth goals, a business that isn't growing is shrinking.
Aww. Poor little lost robot.
Pragmatically:
Second Life does not merit the effort, absolutely agree. It's Sansar I'm worried about. A scorched earth tactic to take out Sansar could also wipe SL away, precisely because it's not worth pillaging or keeping around.
No business analyst worth their salt would have considered Sansar "competion". A shot evaluation wether you want to go through this would have revealed all the mistakes LL made in it's launch...
No business analyst worth their salt would have paid Adam Neumann $1.7 billion to leave WeWork, and yet it happened. There's a lot of crazy going on right now in the investment sector.
All those Trump-Tax-Cut dollars chasing fewer and fewer opportunities bid up the prices of everything, particularly businesses sold on the (often false) premise that they are the hi-tech wave of the future.
Ironically, nothing else is a serious competitor for Second Life.
A mildly interesting quote from that blog post:
Linden Lab Lays Off Over 20 Members of Sansar Team, Confirm Insiders; Social VR Platform to Continue Operating With Skeleton Crew
Confirming a blog post from Ryan Schultz (along with some ominous rumblings I heard last Friday), some insiders tell me that Linden Lab has recently laid off over 20 staffers working on Sansar, the company's social VR platform. Even more...nwn.blogs.com
This is the first time I've seen a source close to LL aknowledging that the Sansar project was started before the change in leadership. Are we seeing the beginning of a blame game here?
I dont' really think we can blame the leadership for this. Second Life has been slowly but surely moving away from the in-world creation concept for over a decade now. This process was well underway when Altberg took over, even back in 2012 when Humble became the CEO. I've yet to see any of those "longtime Linden developers" do anything effective to stop it - quite the contrary - although to be fair I don't know what's happened behind the scene of course.
What an odd thing to say. Developers do not have any authority over management; only the executive leadership of LL sets direction and priorities. I've seen plenty of developers who are short-sighted and clueless about user priorities, but that's not their job. It IS the job of leadership to move the platform in a useful direction that increases revenue stream and user adoption. If SL is failing, it's not the developers who are at fault.
Developers don't have any authority over management in a typical corporate investment structure. Management at Linden Lab is centered around developers telling the managers what they will and won't do. Leadership has been unable to move the platform in a useful direction, since the beginning, because the developers have called the shots. SL is slowly failing and it is the investors who are at fault for shuffling leaders around trying to find one that would put a lid on this monster management that Philip facilitated. But the only solution they've employed is firing people without the ability to replace their experienced knowledge of the spaghetti.
What they don't see is I did so in SL because it was over a decade old and still going strong when I joined - I am just too freaking conservative to do so for some new fad without a future...
If there's a situation that deserves a blame game, I'd say this is it. Surely there is some lesson that needs to be learned from this abysmal failure and some painful consequence that needs to be directed to the responsible party/parties who, with a handful of magic beans. thought it was a good idea to publicly denounce their loyal customer base in hopes of attracting some mythical, better audience.
That's the theory, yes, but even the most authoritarian organisation will have a strong informal command structure and even the lowliest co-worker will have some influence on the direction the organisation takes by how they do (or don't do) their job and how they interpret their orders. The developers are the ones who propose msot new projects and that gives them a considerable power over the organisation's policies.
X-actley - if you replace it you kill the only cash cow in the industry - there are no other profitable ones, nor will any climb up in it's wake.
