In the Country of the Bland: the conference hotel mall and the souk

Over the last few days since the launch of SLEnterprise, there have been varying reactions to the announcement that Linden Lab are developing a standalone grid in a box product for business.

In addition, in another move, content creators have been surveyed by the Lab.  They are being asked to consider new, Linden controlled vendors that levy a 10-15% surcharge in return for promised rich data reporting and metrics and that will, for a fee of US$5 – $10 per item – also upload to XStreet (where, of course, a percentage of profits will also go to Linden Lab). Cross-posted items will automatically be displayed, in rotation, in a premium position as a sponsored listing in on the Classifieds page – which should, I suppose, lessen the impact of having to wade through a screen or two of sex beds and poses before one finds a blessedly normal item of furniture.  To participate in this merchant marketing program would cost of $10-100 USD monthly, depending on sales volume.

The element here that puzzled me most was this:

Linden Lab has developed an Island in Second Life that enables merchants to create their own stores as large or small as they desire. Display your creative works from shoes to houses. In exchange for the free land and promotion of the Mall, Linden Lab will assess a 30% surcharge on all purchases.

Erm … hello?  An island?  For  everyone?  Where they can have a store as large or as small as they desire?

Not for the first time I wonder if the Lindens are living in a Second life that is radically different to that of content creators.

But let’s get back to the SLEnterprise and the proposal for the new Marketplace.

Most of the reactions are occasioned not so much, I think, by the proposal, as by the implications of what goes into the box or, to put it another way, what is added to the box later.

The Lindens desire to develop such a product per se makes good economic sense.   If business is to be tempted into virtual worlds to a significant degree, they will want to maintain it under their own firewalls – the ability to run intranets, as it were, as well as outward facing extranets.  And just as organisations prefer to keep their date behind controlled firewalls when it comes to conventional intranets, so they will wish to do so in using what Philip Rosedale is calling Web3.0 tools.  The Lindens have – albeit clumsily – proved honourable guardians of our data; they have lost things, they have inadvertently wrecked things, but they have not stolen things or exploited the data they hold in ways that have been seen on some open sims.

But there’s a wide difference between that and wanting them to be party to your company secrets.  This is a logical way for Linden Lab to go to maintain leadership in the field … before Open Sims steal their clothes.  Linden Labs are still in the lead, but with developments such as the Science Sim, laying down the Enterprise marker now is probably wise.

So far so good.  But now we come to the sticking point – the Marketplace.

Let’s be honest, the Marketplace is, first and foremost, a confession of failure – the failure to clean up XStreet.

There were problems with XStreet and OnRez when Linden Lab took them over – notably the fact that there was widespread violations of intellectual property rights, and there were also predatory attempts to exploit newcomers ignorance through the sales of the iniquitous businesses in a box (where widely available freebies would be packaged and sold as viable businesses – the premise being that the buyer could use this box to open his/her own business).

The intellectual property violations worked two ways.  Firstly, there were instances where goods that were protected by long-established copyrights were replicated in the virtual environment (such as artefacts from popular movies such as Star Wars, or clothing brands such as Nike).

Secondly, there were instances where goods copybotted or otherwise purloined on the grid were sold on XStreet.  There were also occasions when tools to facilitate theft were sold on XStreet,

Since Linden Lab took over, things have got rather worse.  The Lab could have gone in with a policy of clearing things up.  They could, for example, have coupled DMCAs filed on the grid  with checking the goods being offered on XStreet.  Instead filings have to be made separately for both.  And, over time, the ability to report problems on XStreet has been limited.  Now only the creator of goods can express concern that a violation of Intellectual Property has occurred.  And once one single abuse report on an item has been filed, no-one else can report an item for any violation at all.

This is crazy.

While one does not want to open the floodgates to malicious reporting or group pile-ons that would lead to automatic takedowns, curtailing the ability of residents to report problems is actually self-defeating.

If a car developed a fault that was reported to the manufacturer, and the manufacturer then refused to hear any other complaint, related or not, until the first complaint had been investigated, they would be seen as insane.  Yet that is what the Lab are now doing on XStreet.

If an item has roused suspicions in a number of people who are clearly acting independently, that in itself is an argument for further investigation.  If you cut off your potential sources of information after receiving a single report, you are setting yourselves up to fail again and again until people despair of the system and of the product.

In addition, there is the ongoing problem of sorting XStreet content.  Like the classified on Search, this has been driven purely by commercial interests, which means that the content that sells the most can pay the most to ensure their products are topped listed.  This may work for residents who – with varying degrees of ennui – will work past the Revenge Urban Neko Emo Punk Gothic Style goods on the front page (actually, that was describing the one outfit) to find what they really want,  But the Lindens are, it seems, getting alarmed at the thought that their shiny business clients might have to buy from this raw, vibrant and – in places – downright dodgy venue.

So, it seems, while the ordinary residents can continue to shop in the souk, with all its problems, the business clients are being offered the beautifully appointed shops to be found in the hotel mall, and the Lab is avoiding the hugely time-consuming and argument-fraught task of cleaning up XStreet  by circumventing it entirely, and pushing their business clientele to the polished marble and luxuriously lit discreet stores of their own hotel mall – the Marketplace.

There is also the question of giving an advantage to the Golden Solution Providers.  After all, they have shelled out a certain sum to be offered opportunities not available to the common herd.  There must come a point where the Lab has to pony up on this (can one also hope that they might feel a similar stab of conscience over the premium account holders? So not holding my breath on that one).  By giving the GSPs the first (and possibly the only) crack at the lucrative business contracts, they are giving a clear concrete value to what has previously been a very dubious property.

But I remain deeply concerned about this whole concept.  What makes Second Life rich and exciting is its diversity.  And that diversity comes not from the large corporate orientated designers (or, to be charitable, from them alone) but from the richness of small creations that litter the web.  When I take people to my home, I am likely to point out the exquisite tea glasses that I picked up from kalli and kadri Heart in a Gorean market, the tea-set designed by Kittie Munro with its gorgeous juicy lemon, the richly beautiful Christmas garlands from Lunata Lupino who makes perhaps a dozen of her lovely hand-painted floral textures.

Without that diversity, the new boxed Enterprise solutions become nothing more than sterile recreations of airport chic or Hilton Hotel style.  Corporate solutions creating the Country of the Bland where the corporate goon is King.

In fact, Justin Bovington’s claim in Info Week (Link updated here: 5/5/10 – thanks, Prok!) got it dead wrong.  “It has be less Xstreet, more Wall Street,” he wrote.

But this is to ignore an important point that Desmond Shang has made several times.

The business people that Linden Lab wants to target … are already here.  The most valuable proselytizers for the system … are already on board.

It’s just that they’re not here as business people.  They’re here as residents.

The CEO who spends his evening shopping with all her fashionista friends.

The Senior Executive who holds refined salons in Caledon – or plots revolution in New Babbage.

The IT support who has built a grim urban landscape that friends have battles over in their spare time.

And when Linden Lab upsets the residents, they upset the people they desperately need on board as business people.

But more than that.

One of the reasons that people stay with Second Life, despite repeated anger with the Lab when hit by such major problems as the homestead debacle, is that Open Sim is still too limited.  It can service the needs of the pioneers who are happy to build their virtual log cabins and gingham frocks with their own hands, but the majority of people in Second Life are consumers – if not of everything, then of something very important to them.  The house builders rarely create their own hair AND their own skin AND their own clothes (and if they are that multifariously capable, then they would like to turn a profit on it, thank you very much).

But residents, deprived of their favourite skin, or hair, or clothing, get fretful.  They have been at pains to create a look, a persona they feel happy with.  And they want to be that … wherever.  They stand in Open Sim – and feel like a newb.  And the solution to that – their favourite stores that will tweak them into shape – simply aren’t there.  Not even, as Oscar Wilde so famously has it, for ready money.

So they decide that Open Source is not quite ready for them yet, and walk away.

So when Justin Bovington goes on to say, “It has to reflect relevance, rather than drowning us all in deluge of content: clothing, furniture and avatars,” then he is missing the point.  People who know Second Life love that content – they need their favourites to feel secure.  And a product that offers only a limited, bland selection is not going to find favour with the people who should be most enthusiastic for the product – the people who already love Second Life.

At the moment, there is a clear dilemma.  XStreet is a mess, and the Lindens aren’t  willing to devote the manpower or hours to clean it up.  And yet, at the same time, they are desperately trying to push NEW ways to advertise on XStreet with such as the new, Linden controlled vendors that levy a 10-15% surcharge in return for promised rich data reporting and metrics and that will, for a fee of US$5 – $10 per item – also upload to XStreet (where, of course, a percentage of profits will also go to Linden Lab) – as I mentioned earlier.

But, apart from trying to make more money from the small traders who will be using inworld vendors and XStreet, Linden Lab also have to reward those who have signed up as GSPs.  So we will have a two track system – the souk and the conference hotel mall.

But to capture the diversity of content, rather like the sale of the local goods in the hotel mall – where wealthy tourists can buy the creations of local artisans at a heavily marked up premium price – many of the GSPs are going to be employing the people who sell inworld and on XStreet.  Linden Lab will be outsourcing the control of content that passes into the business environment.  And if the Mom and Pop businesses in Second Life want a piece of the pie, then they will have to sign away all their rights in their creation and only imagine it being used behind glass walls that they are not permitted to penetrate.

According to Justin Bovington again, “if [Linden Lab] attracts the right people to develop these apps, this could be the tipping point.”

The point about a tipping point is that the most effective ones tend to lead to things going downhill thereafter.