(Originally published at SLNN.COM.)
Last week, residents of Second Life grappled with their views of the Second Life value proposition and how they felt that Linden Lab was doing to defend the value proposition.

Residents of Second Life have many different views of what provides the true value of Second Life, and of what promotes brand loyalty to Second Life. For many, it is the community. Second Life is inhabited by creative and interesting people. That draws others to Second Life. Companies wishing to do business in Second Life recognize this part of the value proposition. They want to reach people who are thought leaders, who are well connected. Yet many feel that recent actions by Linden Lab have further eroded the community and have done considerable damage to the Second Life brand.

Others feel that what is most compelling about the Second Life brand is the platform. Second Life is the environment where they can most easily and reliably create three-dimensional objects that they can sell and share with other. For these people, the stability of the environment is extremely important, especially as residents plan events where they can gather with others to demonstrate new objects, new places, or simply discussion important issues.

This ties back to the ideas of the Second Life community. Yet recent instability of the platform, together changes in basic level required for the Second Life viewer have frustrated residents.

Meanwhile, it appears to many as if Linden Lab views their most important asset as the assorted trademarks that they own. They have instituted new policies that go far beyond what normal companies do to protect their trademark; they have threatened to ban residents of Second Life from using their systems if they improperly use any of the Second Life trademarks. This would be similar to Coca Cola Corporation managing to prevent anyone who uses the word ‘Coke’ to refer to any soft drink from drinking the Coca Cola brand soft drink. It has left a sour taste in the mouth of many residents.

At the same time, recent changes to Second Life have required residents to upgrade their viewers. This has presented problems for many, especially those in education who have to support many machines at the same time which often barely meet minimum requirements. In response to these concerns, Linden Lab held a few a few inworld informational sessions with Pastrami Linden. Pastrami discussed how to optimize the latest viewers for older hardware. Linden Lab maintains that the latest viewers are even faster than the old ones.

The main grid, itself, has not been all that stable during this period, and residents have sought different ways of dealing with their frustration about the outages. Many have simply taken pleasant walks outside in the spring weather. Others have spent time visiting alternative grids. Mannix Mensing and Celina Lathrop have sought to organize residents to form a group inworld, to hold a peaceful march in the Linden Village to express their dissatisfaction, and to start working on forming a players association that, among other things, would work with Linden Lab to establish proper quality of service metrics and guidelines.

Not everyone believes this will be effective. Some complain that Linden Lab has never listened to residents. They note the poor response to issues brought up on JIRA. They also complain that most residents aren’t all that interested and won’t join a players association, or that the residents have too big egos and will only join player associations where they are the major players.

Yet the peaceful march filled four Linden Sims to the max. They are recruiting new members, working on their mission statement, surveying members and have begun preliminary discussions with Linden Lab. The question that sums it up for many of the marchers is, “Why do tier payments never fail?”

Many prominent Second Life bloggers did their own form of organizing and went on strike from April 15th through the 18th. This attracted the attention of real life journalists as well as folks at Linden Lab. After a lively discussion on the Metanomics channel, Linden Lab released a statement attempting to clarify their latest position on trademarks.

Is Linden Lab starting to pay closer attention to its residents? Are they starting to get the importance of brand and community? Let us hope so. For, as long as senior management at Linden Lab fail to differentiate between the value proposition of a grid of formulas used by accountants to create budgets and a grid of sims used by creatives to build community, their future as a key player in the virtual world markets remains dubious.