Linden Lab sets terror-alert level to 'Google'
by Tateru Nino 
Aug 9th 2008 at 4:00PM
Filed under: MMO industry, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds, Lively
Linden Lab certainly showed signs of fear when Google's Lively kicked off its public beta. Now we're seeing signs more akin to terror, panic or desperation. 'Who wouldn't be concerned when Google comes after their business?' said new Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon to Bloomberg.
Given recent changes and marketing pushes, you can see Linden Lab's management showing a sheen of sweat. Curiously, it seems that Google isn't after Linden Lab's business -- Lively's certainly no competitor to the business that Linden Lab has. However, what Google represents seems to be a threat to the business that Linden Lab wants to have.
This week saw the hiring of Frank Ambrose (AOL's head of technology for infrastructure and network services for a decade) as Senior VP of global technology. While Ambrose has more tech knowledge than the average suit in his position, his primary competencies seem to be negotiations, coordination, contracts and costs -- which all marries up nicely with Linden Lab making a push into corporate, government and military sales, and hiring additional staff to do just that. We're not sure what they're going to be selling, exactly, but virtual environment meeting spaces are probably right at the top of the list.
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This presents a marked change of direction for Linden Lab who have traditionally avoided any relationship with their business-customers while celebrating a more or less undirected aggregation of individual users. In recent months, however, Linden Lab has been adapting their presentation, increasingly talking down the value and contributions of individual users of the service, and talking up corporations, non-profits, and charities -- of whom they were once dismissive and distant.
While the 275-person privately held company is profitable, just how profitable they are depends on who you ask. Board members and most Linden executives suggest "sort of" profitability, while Linden Lab CFO John Zdanowski suggests that Linden Lab is wildly, gaily, insanely profitable in terms usually only used by those who are being dazed by the tintinnabulation of cash-registers.
As for how well the service is growing, that's another matter for debate. Kingdon says that growth has been slowing for quite a while -- while other watchers of key metrics suggest that growth has stalled, or that there's actually some shrinkage. A lot of that comes down to quite how you define growth. The numbers can be interepreted in a variety of ways -- just how you slice the words and define the exact meaning of 'growth' makes all the difference.
Whether it is terror at the advent of Google's Lively service, a long-planned course charted on Linden Lab's secret strategic roadmap, or a new direction brought in by Kingdon, it seems clear that the goals of Linden Lab are increasingly tenuously aligned with those of the service's existing users.
That's alright, though. If Linden Lab can rekindle its growth (or "supercharge that growth", as Kingdon puts it), then it doesn't actually need its existing users.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
saggo said on 4:20PM 8-09-2008
Well if google get some problems with linden labs, they simply buy the entire company..
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sigmund leominster said on 5:25PM 8-09-2008
Well, launching a beta version of a new virtual world my make LL take some notice, but Lively is not yet the "giant killer" that the SL doomsayers may make it out to be. There's competitive pressure across the board for LL from many other sources. Remember how Starbucks was going to be "crushed" by the competition? Turns out the whale hunter simply created a ocean into which many independents could swim, and reports of its demise were greatly exaggerated (and no, the recent closing of 600 stores is not proof-of-impending-death but a normal readjustment to a policy of too rapid growth).
By all means expect LL to be on its toes, but Lively is a long way from shooting off SL's kneecaps.
http://sigmundleominster.blogspot.com
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Rob said on 3:47AM 8-11-2008
I couldn't agree more, Lively is no match for Second Life, yet. But with some more development of an economy they may be.
http://www.google-lively.com/buy%20in%20lively.html
Imagine when you can buy and sell items in Lively. That may cause some disruption in SL's economy.
Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 5:51AM 8-10-2008
After a month watching anxiously the statistics at Google Lively's own site, I'm everything but impressed. It attracted 50,000 rooms (they're so easy to create... and abandon) in a day or two. After 2 more days, they grey to 90,000. Now they're 135,000 after a month. That shows obviously an exponential growth, surely, but not an overall impressive one. The number of new rooms now grows at a thousand or so per day.
But as said, rooms are easy to create and abandon. Visitors are also tracked down by Lively, and here we'll see much less impressive statistics. The most "famous" room is Google's own: it attracted 22,000 or so non-unique visitors (i.e. the same person is counted twice if they visit the room twice, even in the same day) after a day, and 52,000 after a month. That's nothing. You can equate non-unique visitors with a webserver's "page views" (a meaningless statistic for marketeers, but an important one for system administrators, since it shows the load a webserver is under) — and in that case, a humble blog like mine gets that amount in a week or so, with 400 unique visitors every day. This is everything but "impressive growth".
Granted, Google is hardly promoting Lively. It just seems an afterthought these days. I was personally expecting a lot of more enthusiasm around Lively.
So I wonder if Linden Lab is really that worried about Lively. It might just be Mark Kingdon shifting the focus of Second Life: he read the signs on the VW '08 conference — everybody was going for 3D Flash games for kids — and he wants to make it quite clear that Linden Lab is not in that business and doesn't believe in it (neither do I): they wish to go corporate and side with their partners IBM (and possibly Microsoft) to offer a completely different environment and target a totally different market than the one Lively wishes to compete.
Sure, it's good to be watching closely what the competition is doing. Twinity, for instance, recently released a survey where they asked their clients what kinds of features they would like to see on their virtual world. They did the homework well: all the major features are taken from Second Life, namely, more avatar personalisation (clothes, animations); land sales, land rentals; and uploading user-created objects. All things that Google has no intention to have. So I think that everybody's strategy is either trying to enter the "kid market" (hopefully with a product that is better than Google's Lively...) or instead follow the leader in the "serious" social environment for adults and compete with Second Life. I'd say that Linden Lab is not "fearing" the giant Google, but making sure they grab the corporate market before Kaneva, Twinity, Vivaty, or any other start-up catches up with them in that much more interesting market...
But, alas, Linden Lab might have some secret information on what Google plans to do next...
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