Kingdon's Second Life updates: What's missing?
by Tateru Nino 
Oct 1st 2008 at 11:00AM
Filed under: News items, Opinion, Second Life
New Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon is still making irregular postings to the official Second Life blog. It's all heady and exciting stuff, to be sure. Growth, focus on improvement of the new user experience, simplified registration, and so on.
Yet something seems to be missing. What's missing is anything that excites you if you're already a Second Life user. There's plenty here to entice those who aren't already users, but if you're already one, there doesn't seem to be anything much in them for you to get excited about. Put together with some other pieces, however, it certainly creates an interesting picture about future direction for Second Life.
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There's the navigation update to the viewer in the works, but that initiative pretty much predates Kingdon's tenure within the company (it started on 17 April), as do the stability improvements and infrastructure work that are bringing in more users. Still, as the front-man for the Lab right now, we can't begrudge Kingdon as focus for the credit for this work.
(We're a bit more dubious about the usefulness of the navigation update in a Second Life context, given the prototypes and designs, but that's another story)
Kingdon also mentioned the new Chief Product Officer, Tom Hale, whom we wrote about previously. Hale's very interesting, given his speciality and prior associations.
You see, Hale was heavily involved with Acrobat Connect (and formerly Macromedia Breeze). Essentially, Hale is a specialist in teleconferencing/remote meeting products for departments and enterprises. The teleconferencing market has a considerable hole in it left by fractured and disjointed teleconferencing product strategies at Microsoft. That's a gap that's ripe for filling with an enterprise teleconferencing product.
The only problem is that Linden Lab doesn't have an enterprise teleconferencing product.
Oh, wait. Now they do -- only it isn't actually entirely their own product. They have an exclusive license to market and sell the Rivers Run Red Immersive Workspaces product.
When you look at the hiring of Tom Hale, the ongoing hiring of enterprise sales and marketing staff, and the licensing of the Immersive Workspaces product from Rivers Run Red, this all seems to signal a clear direction for where Linden Lab is taking Second Life. Clearer than anything else we've seen in a year, certainly.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Ari Blackthorne said on 12:05PM 10-01-2008
Oh yes, yes.
This picture was begining to show itself more than a year ago. it was a fuzzy, out-of-focus picture back in early to mid 2007, but the picture was definately there.
And now as our eyes clear and the picture comes into focus... we all who had that nigly feeling all along feel the bittersweet vindication: Linden Lab is pushing Second Life (more specifically: the technology) toward corporate/commercial uses.
Perhaps not the Second Life Agni grid per se, but definately leveraging what is already here and now, to build-out those VPGs (Virtual Private Grids, anyone, ala Virtual Private Networks?)
Of course it's easy to look back at all of your reports and other reports and blogger opinions and compress them into a contiguous roll of information to see a clear and concise raodmap in progress.
it also makes clear why Linden lab all but abandons the blog. It all comes down to a public perception and identity impression for all those potential customers the soon-to-be-hired outside-sales staff will be contending with.
~winks~
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Eris said on 2:45PM 10-01-2008
I think Ari's right - this is about The Grid more than it's about Second Life - why are we still conflating the two when LL made it clear ages ago they see them (or perhaps market them?) as two connected yet separate entities?
Do 'Immersive Workspaces' (which has to be one of the clumsiest-sounding product names ever) run within SL or on a wider grid? Who would even want them to run within SL - so your AGM is attended by a clutch of naked noobs, a Gorean day-tripper and a Gnu - you'd have to be crazy?
SL will become one of LL products and will probably continue in a very similar vein to the one it already occupies, it makes money so why would they change it? They simply need more strings to their bow and are moving in that direction.
Maybe after all its our myopia, not Linden's, that can't see the way forward?
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Moriz Gupte said on 2:02PM 10-02-2008
You are absolutely right. As a fairly old SL user, I am not seeing anything that is really going to excite me. What about web integration? HTML on a prim? Simplified video streaming? Those are supposed to be very very old projects. Anyway, here's my take why SL has an uphill battle if compared to video conferencing solutions
http://snipurl.com/3zuzr
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Moriz Gupte said on 2:10PM 10-02-2008
Sorry guys, wrong snipurl
for some reason it is going to my clipboard anyway, here's where I argue that SL has an uphill battle against video conferencing soln.
http://irhbt.typepad.com/virtually_yours/2008/09/some-thoughts-a.html
Moriz Gupte said on 2:03PM 10-02-2008
You are absolutely right. As a fairly old SL user, I am not seeing anything that is really going to excite me. What about web integration? HTML on a prim? Simplified video streaming? Those are supposed to be very very old projects. Anyway, here's my take why SL has an uphill battle if compared to video conferencing solutions
http://snipurl.com/3zuzr
Reply
Moriz Gupte said on 2:02PM 10-02-2008
sorry,
wrong snipurl
Here's the correct one
Anyway, here's my take why SL has an uphill battle if compared to video conferencing solutions
http://snipurl.com/3zuzr
Reply