Will WSE ever reappear in Second Life? If it does, will it survive?
The World Stock Exchange (WSE) closed on 4th January 2008 for one month for "upgrades." As many coders who play the money market or read the news wondered, why the long shut down? Consider Linden Lab: they roll out upgrades across thousands of servers in a few hours of downtime, because they prepare and test the code in the background. Although we all cross our fingers the number of problematic upgrades is actually very small, and their code is millions of times more complicated.
Since then, WSE has decided to stop trading in Linden Dollars altogether, and reasserted the statement it is simply a game. This, despite having several people, including Anshe Chung, who are rather regarded as heavy-weight business people rather than merely players. There have been ongoing stories about businesses being delisted for bad-mouthing the WSE, even now it's closed - apparently blogging that you are considering leaving is enough to get you delisted.
Now we get into the realms of rumour. Of course sometimes in money markets rumour is all that is needed to make or break a financial institution. There are rumours that many CEOs of WSE listed companies are worried that WSE is doing very little, very late. Perhaps too little, too late? The same rumour mill has a much more interesting piece of grist. It is rumoured that Anshe Chung, who trades on WSE as Third Party, has been approaching the CEOs of companies she has invested in and is talking about expanding her own Dreamland Stock Exchange. Even if LukeConnell Vandeverre manages to do whatever it is he needs to do to reopen WSE will he have enough interest left to keep his game afloat?
