They are not stable enough to be a work platform. They are not flexible enough to be a game platform. They are not controlled enough to be an economic platform. What they ARE is a scam selling the "your dream, your reality" idea then dumping those that buy, to glean more suckers. If fact My simple dream, "make a cave in the side of the mountain" or better yet a tunnel through the mountain (laughs insanely.....) did you suggest a sculpty megaprim????? (insane laughter rising exponentially...) did I mention wanting to walk through said tunnel (convulses in a blithering mass of quivering protoplasm....) They arbitrarily scam "players" by charging one price for land in real US dollars today and they for no reason except to line their pockets, drop the price (PUMP AND DUMP securities scandal) so that anyone who bought "virtual land" has no hope of selling it even though it was bought at a 1,250 price.... They state now that land sales and tier fees are 8x more profitable than premium account people. So this "linden government" instead of printing more money, simply print more land... empty islands dont cost them anything to render since they are only some bit images on a hard disk somewhere until an avatar actually GOES there. so an island that someone buys and pays $75 a month for (that is the cost of the "limited use islands" I think) only costs lindens when they log in on that odd weekend they have nothing to do except play doll dress up. I wont even start with stability(was poor is now "ok) but two things they have never realized and both were PRIMARY movers were first: the ability to use babbler and babbler like devices so that people all over the world could meet on one place and "typetalk" to each other. The should have had translation "builtin" so that a persons type statements are "automatically" seen by everyone in the vicinity, in their own language without ANY interaction required. My club used to have people from France, Germany, Italy, UK and US, but since babblers have all started screwing up more than they work, I now have a few English speakers come in. I never tried to "make" money in secondlife... I get way to nutz to deal with half assed operations that don't stay up from one hour to the next. In My professional life, I buy My mainframe computer time from an IBM complex in Dallas and in the year I have been on it, it has NEVER BEEN DOWN ONCE except for the one hour weekly scheduled maintenance window... I can and DO run My business on that platform. a platform BTW that will support 1,000 concurrent linux boxes running on it at once. Each linux box seeing itself as the only user. Lindens make a pretense of "protecting" creators rights, but they can't even "protect" creators objects much less the rights to them. Things that have been working in the real world for years, group chats, group voice, share images, shared streams, linden labs insists on making their own mistakes that were all made before and fixed by others and so their group chat still doesn't work reliably, teleport at least now does not log Me off when it fails, at least not today, and I can login usually. What I DON'T any longer is pour $2,500 USD a month into linden labs "economy"... I am down to $195 a month and one class 4 sim and I am walking away from that (because I can't sell it, when they try to raise My monthly fee from the $195 that I bought in at. The second thing they needed to be but failed, was a data "visualization" platformbut they have never had a powerful enough scripting language to allow the mathematic's to be done that needed to be done.....perhaps mono will help that some, but the second part needs to be what I call "dynamic sculpties" which is where I can build a texture in-world numerically to represent the web mesh needed to show the relationship between points and then drop it onto a prim and have that relationship changed as the mesh changes.... (steps down off soapbox.... so much to say.... so few to hear)