The Short Fix
“Listen, I’m an old man. I’m much older than you think. I can’t go on for ever. I’ve got no children of my own, no family at all. So who is going to run the factory when I get too old to do it myself? Someone’s got to keep it going – if only for the sake of the Oompa-Loompas. Mind you, there are thousands of clever men who would give anything for the chance to come in and take over from me, but I don’t want that sort of person. I don’t want a grown-up person at all. A grown-up won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child. I want a good sensible loving child, one to whom I can tell all my most precious sweet-making secrets – while I am still alive.” ~ Roald Dahl, Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.
“You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.” ~ Walt Disney.
Because it needs two quotes. That’s why.
I probably shouldn’t blog when I’m running a fever. But I’m bored.
So while most people are humming “Ding Dong, the M Is Dead” and tying yellow ribbons ’round old oak trees for the return of King Philip, I’ve been mulling, as have some of the calmer voices. Zero, Grace, and Zha have all produced reasoned thoughts as well as a host of others. I just keep coming up against one big problem.
Philip couldn’t get it done the first time. Not really. He climbed the mountain, but Wile E. Coyote-d all the way down after that.
I like Philip. I respect him as a visionary. He is actually up there, in his own way, with people like Walt Disney — people who saw something amazing and set out to make it happen. And, unlike most, he made it happen. But what usually sustains the dreamers is not just the dream or luck or the right place at the right time — it’s the ability to engage the right people in the dream with you.
There are three main ways of doing this — (1) making the hard calls and entrusting the people who know how to make things happen (Walt Disney and his brother, Roy), (2) being a charismatic sociopath and turning the world around you into a sort of brainwash zone where your minions believe their existence depends on helping you achieve your goals (Jobs, Gates) or (3) frolicking about making daydream declarations and trusting the Oompa Loompas to deus ex machina you out of the tight spots (hint: one of these only works in fiction).
If the problem with capitalism is capitalists, then the problem with vision is visionaries. They are sometimes their own worst enemies and the worst enemies of their own dreams. Linden Lab suffered early and often because the right people were in the wrong jobs. And, once that festered, the wrong people then became cemented into other positions (ie: the inevitable nepotism). And the whole sunshine and flowers “everyone work on what they want” philosophy turned into a nightmare of nothing getting done.
As the only person I know who was actually unschooled, I can tell you the model only works to a certain point. At some stage knowledge, like work, is unpleasant, but if you’re going to build a mind or a company, the unpleasant stuff has to be done and someone has to be there to make sure it goes right. In business sometimes you get lucky and you have a martyr to do that on their own. If there ever was a Martyr Linden, however, I never met them.
Grace points out that Philip has to get an amazing number one, and that can’t happen fast enough. Zha points out that there needs to be a priority of things that address the current concerns of the existing SL population. I would suggest hiring an average teenager to sit in a room and state the obvious all day, as well, and I’m only half-kidding.
The short fix is easy to say, hard to do. Grace is right. Philip is stuck as the nice guy “Good Daddy.” He needs a “Bad Mommy” to help him parent his adolescent child through these growing pains, and he has to keep himself from sneaking the kid candy after Mom grounds it. This is a rare second chance. M Linden took the hit and cleaned out a lot of dead weight with him. There are no obligations of “How can you fire me, I was standing right next to you when X went live…” or other can’t-fire-guilt lingering.
Zha is also right, and a lot of our suggestions for priorities align.
My priority list would be more like this:
1. Hire someone you respect enough to yell at you when you’re wrong and professional enough to take it on the chin when the hard calls have to be made. Give that person as much power as humanly possible to keep the trains running on time. Pay them. Love them. Pet them.
2. Get your PR house in order. Create actual liaisons to deal with the existing population, the businesses who want to come in, and the educational institutions that want to explore. Stop thinking this is all or nothing and there can be only one. Make their job descriptions include the fact that they have to talk to each other and they have to spend time in the actual fucking product using it the way their base uses it. Tell them not to talk about anything they don’t know (like live music, art, or anything else that happens in SL and has a pulse). Make businesses and education believe they matter. Make residents feel heard. Honestly, no one expects you to do these things 100% (or even 50%) right in business these days, so if you just learn to fake it better that would be an improvement.
3. Communication. For the love of GOD fix it. Any kid that ever went to EPCOT and rode Spaceship Earth understands that communication is the foundation of technology and human society. If your product is failing on communication, your product is doomed. Fix it. Groups. Privacy. ALL OF IT. This should be your main goal for the rest of the life of SL. If you cannot answer how the project you’re working on contributes to people communicating better with one another, your project is a bad one.
4. Interface with small groups of the population. Find out what their issues are. Stop pretending JIRA works. Ignore the crazy people. If you can’t identify the crazy people, call me, I have a list. Again, this is where the average teenager sitting in the room next to you can be of help.
5. Look at what your competition is already doing and do it better. Use the Emerald viewer for a week and realize why over half your users prefer it to your product. You don’t have to work on view 3.0. No, I’m lying. You do. Like yesterday.
6. Give people things that do not suck when you want them to spend money on you. That whole thing about Linden Houses? I’m not sure what you were thinking, but you should never forget how stupid it was. You want to get more people to upgrade to paid accounts? Give them one free “back up” a month so that they can revert to a previous inventory in case of lost data. Then charge them a modest fee to restore after a data loss issue up to X times per year (to prevent exploiting the system). No one else can offer that but you. Give residents the ability to share inventories across registered accounts up to X alts. No one else can do that but you. Give merchants with paid accounts and private regions the ability to list demos in their profiles. This will remove a boatload of crap from XStreet and stop people from having to lag down sims to try on demos. No one can do this but you. Offer those same merchants the ability to set up and manage recurring subscriptions. Build in features that no one else can offer. Make your product necessary. Give people something worth upgrading for.
7. Fix events. Now. Yesterday. Make it possible for people to figure out what the hell to do when they get bored in the platform instead of just quitting.
8. Search. Nuff said.
9. Accept that the adult aspect of SL is a bigger part of the the business in SL than any of you are comfortable with. You may want to call it “clothing sales” but trust me, it’s about making their avatar look hot at the club. You don’t have to endorse anything illegal, become a porn producer, or bring it to the front page, but stop acting like you’re ashamed of one of the major reasons people join SL and stop trying to kick it to the curb.
10. When you fix search, sell adwords like any other company would already be doing. Sell ads during log-in instead of the silly news updates no one reads. Do basic things to increase your income. Make money in the obvious ways, ffs. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel on everything.
11. All your suggestions and “hey, kids, look what you can get” stuff is embarrassingly off the mark of what your user base is actually using your product for. Just put a banner on the website that says “We are out of touch” and stop paying people to make irrelevant lists. Look beyond the ass-kissers and the self-promoting halfwits and figure out who is honest and professional and in touch. The days when you could just throw together a party with volunteers is over. If you’re going to have events and promote activities HIRE PEOPLE WHO KNOW ABOUT THEM or leave them alone.
12. Be as honest as possible with your user base. Yes, the crazy cat people and bitches like me will always have something negative to say. But when you say one thing to reporters and do another with your product, it makes you and Linden Lab appear intellectually bankrupt. It also opens doors of liability that I’m sure make your lawyers wake up in cold sweats. For the most part even we shallow consumer-types respond well to honesty. If we know you’re working on it. If we know it’s on the list. If we know you’re trying we will give you a lot of fucking rope. Look what we’ve already given you, despite yourselves.
13. Give land owners actual control of their land, especially on private regions. We need better management tools for griefing if nothing else. We also need data and information from YOU on how to manage lag. We need to know how script size, script time, texture load, etc all work together to bog down user experiences. We need to know how to prioritize these things when calls have to be made. We need to educate our visitors on how to be respectful toward each other.
14. Stop screwing over the creative community. It’s bad enough that you insult the live music community on a regular basis by pretending to care, but shafting media and content creators in wide sweeping gestures? Cut that shit out. Content creators make the trampy clothes that keep your beloved consumers wiggling their pixels in SL. It’s bad enough they have to deal with the realities of content theft; they don’t need your guff as well. FIX build problems. That crap about SL having 5 decimal places, but we only get 3, so we have all these hairline fractures in our stuff? Stop that. That bug with the 1 pixel fuck-up on textures? Fix that, too. Your users are zoom freaks and your best content creators are anal retentive. That .0001 we can’t get to without scripts or alternate viewers really pisses us of.
Once you have a handle on these things (and I’m not saying once they’re all solved, I’m saying once you have a handle on them) then you can murmur something about the next shiny thing without us burning you at the stake. Fix it, make practical improvements on the existing, and then you can dream the next dream, reach the unreachable stars — whatever soundtrack plays in your head when your light bulbs go off. But until then, you’re cut off. Whatever is on the plate now is all you get until you finish your veggies.
I’m now going to sleep and dream that Philip is capable of managing his dreams. Because I like the way he dreams and there’s got to be someone out there to help him get it right. Including an average teenager.
