[Reset] and do a 180º turn
Today, Linden Lab turned another page on the history book for virtual worlds and entered another chapter… or, to be more precise, they turned a page back. Which is surprising. Linden Lab normally doesn’t do that. So, what happened?
First of all, I feel terribly sorry about the long list of Lindens that lost their jobs. Some of them have been around for eons and were good friends. Some, which you all will recognise, did an outstanding job while they were at the ‘lab — it’s incredible how M Linden has the courage to face them and tell them to go home. I profusely thank to all of you personally for the incredible work you’ve done in the past half-decade on behalf of all of us, and wish you all the best for your next endeavour, whatever it might be.
But now it’s time to see what this is all about. While the SLogosphere is already panicking (who writes those press releases anyway!?) and most can only read the words MASSIVE LAY-OFF AT LINDEN LAB, it’s worth to pay attention to the small print, which is where the interesting news actually are.
It’s about our world, after all
During the last days of Philip “Linden” Rosedale’s supreme reign, LL was starting to push out Second Life to areas that it was not prepared to deal with. They were all turned to the idea of Second Life as a residential, consumer product. It was supposed to be a Lego for adults, who would connect to it from home, and share their buildings with friends, and do crazy things with it. But all of a sudden, starting in 2006, real business and real academics started to see SL as an incredible opportunity to do a completely different things, not possible elsewhere.
People panicked at that time. They thought that all of a sudden “our” virtual world was going to be swamped over with ads and boards all over the place. The dozens of thousands of small businesses in SL (which have grown to hundreds of thousands these days) were scared about the “competition” coming from Real Business, which they feared that they could swamp SL with cheap or free content created by professionals paid in real money for real wages.
This, of course, did never happen (companies obviously hired existing residents; know-how is not something you can replicate so quickly). Instead, businesses clashed with LL’s policies. They wanted control over their sims; LL was not prepared to relinquish it. MTV jumped straight out and went to use There.com’s technology because of that; CSI:NY grumbled about the same and CBS didn’t do much more experimenting in SL after their initial efforts. The reason was the same: LL was antagonistic to RL corporations in SL.
But this quickly became impossible to stop. More and more corporations started to enter SL (1500 are known to be in-world), and they started to make demands. Professional developers were appalled at the way LL treated their clients. It was impossible, for instance, to get billed. Lots of excuses were invented on the spot to “explain” why LL was not really helping out companies to enter SL. At some stage, groups of independent developers even offered LL some help to create for free an official site for companies, which would have a completely different message than the “residential SL” consumer-oriented portal (an idea that obviously LL rejected, like they already had rejected a previous offer of help to run the in-world customer support, also for free).
So during the “hype years” of 2006/7, when corporations were all raging to enter SL, LL was simply not showing the appropriate attitude. And at the same time, universities were also starting to offer services in SL — and doing research. And, of course, stumbling over all the obstacles: thanks to Pathfinder Linden, who also had left a few months ago, at least they still had some official support back then from the ‘Lab. Corporations had no such luck.
A lot was written already about how companies “got it all wrong” during the hype days, and that’s the reason why besides IBM and Intel few have endured until today. But LL’s anti-corporation stance was not much discussed. Over time, they started to be a bit more flexible, but they took their time.
Then we entered the reign of M Linden. He came with a solid corporate background of managing a company that was focused on the corporate market, not the residential one. And he noticed that all these corporations were still knocking at LL’s door begging to enter. But they also had a long, long list of complaints of things that didn’t work well, from customer support, to an impossibly-high-learning curve, to lack of control.
M Linden started massively hiring new people, and re-assigning teams to new priorities. He realised that SL was not growing exponentially, but merely by a few percent every year — good enough to please the stakeholders, but not something that would earn him a picture as Time‘s Man of The Year. And that’s because SL was mostly — and still is — a service for the residential market. How could M bring the corporations in?
A lot of new ideas were implemented, all at the same time. A new web strategy was developed, where the consumer, enterprise, and educational markets would be clearly separated. The biggest change, of course, happened on the enterprise side: developers started being addressed much more like partners than “pests who ask too much from us”; corporations finally were able to be properly billed and even send wire transfers for payments instead of using the CEO’s personal credit card; a new product, SL-behind-the-firewall, was launched; a new marketplace was announced (still not launched); and a new viewer, allegedly easier to use, was introduced.
At the same time, on the residential side of things, a lot was being cut down. A ghetto was created to put the adult community (i.e. pretty much a third of SL’s economy) “out of sight”. Orientation islands were dumped. The Mentors were disbanded. All sort of crazy policies were implemented, with lots of drama around the interpretation of the new ToS. And the long-term open source strategy around their viewer totally backfired: instead of crowdsourcing a lot of eager programmers to fix bugs and implement new features, because LL takes 6-18 months to implement a patch of a single line of code (due to strict Quality Assurance procedures), programmers just gave up, forked the code, and launched a myriad of new projects, among which Emerald is the leader — and also the group that split the most, as new developers grabbed the code and released their own ToS-breaking, content-copying versions instead.
It became a mess, and the reluctance of adopting SL 2.0, combined with broken search didn’t help LL’s plans much. To make matters worse, LL started to aggressively compete with its own residents, by offering Linden Homes, which allegedly increased the number of Premium users, at the cost of putting established communities and land owners out of business and forced to try to sell and rent land below cost if they wanted to stay around. I have no idea if the extra Premium accounts compensated for the loss of landmass from landowners who gave up and closed their businesses.
Nevertheless, the residential side of LL’s business continued to thrive, which is quite a feat, and would run against all expectations. In spite of everything, SL grows, and grows more than the RL economy, even if there has been a slight decline of simultaneous users (but not of new users). Hours-per-month, however, continue to increase, as well as almost all indicators.
On the business side, we have no numbers. But… seriously… how many SL Enterprise boxes has LL shipped? They made a huge deal of listing the dozen beta-testers. I estimate that not more than 20 SLE boxes were ever sold. That means less than 1% of all income. 99% still come from the residents, doing business as usual, even in spite of all the difficulties.
I guess that M Linden was baffled. Why weren’t businesses rushing in like crazy? Now that LL had changed its strategy and approach to business and education — setting new sites, creating a network of partners to act as a sales force, launching new products and services, even opening up in-world business hubs… why weren’t all those corporations flooding the gates like they did in 2006/7, when LL was against them and they still came?
I have no idea what answer M did get. But I can speculate!
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Gwyneth. As usual with your posts, I can only nod my head in agreement.
I like how you've connected the dots with this short history of SL. I hope that LL can make this 180 and really listen to the people who are (and have been) creating and enjoying their second lives. It always bothered me how LL seemed so eager to twist the world we created into something sterile, safe, and corporate.
Great post Gwyneth. My concern is that the 'SL in a browser' plan seems to be still catering to the education and corporate market, and I agree with you that those clients were always going to opt for their own more controllable sims and their own communities. Many of the Lindens who are being laid off seem to be those who have worked with residents, been inworld and worked hardest to support great communities and quality content in SL. I'm not sure that indicates a committment to residents from now on?
Aside from your description of M Linden as being capable of formulating or implementing anything resembling a plan, this is a rather good take.
One day when this has played out, the call to open source will perhaps be regarded as one of the least wise business moves ever. That it was done expecting good will standing with open arms that found feces flung instead by the reality of copybot and other exploits is really just a footnote compared to the competitor they created in their own form unshackled by all those silly limitations and rules. Heck, I bet those silly age play guys are free to make their very own grid now. Imagine that. Courtesy Linden.
I would love to believe this is an acceptance they were on the wrong course with enterprise, but it's rather hard seeing this embrace of web that brings more questions than answers. I suspect what someone will pay for land or clothing in a “world” versus what they will pay for in their browser is different (be the limitations visual or just perception). I'm also fascinated to see the grid work across browsers when my silly blog looks different on some like those folks who won't give up IE6 for me or Linden (or don't know how).
Bravo! You're the first blog I've read who's mostly gotten it. Still, I think you're optimistic about your perception about Mark Kingdon's refocusing, and I think you glossed over a lot of the mistakes made targeting corporations. Examples: Marketing was not consistent, new orientation experience didn't learn from past mistakes, downsizing and lack of support for Enterprise and Business. Your article paints it more as a lack of demand for SL for enterprise and educational items, but really, I perceive an inability to truly listen to developers and companies and universities, as well as an inability to actually rebrand / remarket SL.
Nice post Gwyn. I did my Leaping the Chasm ala Moore analysis and March and I see the target market a little differently – it's Residents yes, but a new type of Resident. http://phasinggrace.blogspot.com/2010/03/linden...
This is also why I think we'll see some big cultural shifts.
It's not only the corporate and educational markets that will benefit from a Web-based viewer, Juko… everybody will benefit from the ability to run SL from an underpowered computer!
But I agree that there is a mixed message on the commitment to residents. I mean, is M Linden saying that they don't want people like Blue Linden around when dealing with residents!? I cannot possibly understand that!It's not only the corporate and educational markets that will benefit from a Web-based viewer, Juko… everybody will benefit from the ability to run SL from an underpowered computer!
But I agree that there is a mixed message on the commitment to residents. I mean, is M Linden saying that they don't want people like Blue Linden around when dealing with residents!? I cannot possibly understand that!
Oh no, Adric… the web-based viewer is just that, a viewer to the existing grid. If you take a look at what you can do with an engine like Unity3D you'll see there is no difference between logging in with the Web-based version or a stand-alone application to the same kind of content. That's what LL is going to do.
Well, I hope they are, anyway — that's how I read it
I can hardly believe they'd dump the whole virtual world, its communities and economy, and its revenue stream to start doing Facebook applications 
(But… who knows!… Perish the thought!)
You're right, Ron… I just painted a biased perspective based on my own experience: companies and universities, unless they have millions to invest in VWs (and these days, few do), simply have a list of requirements that Second Life does not match, or, when it does, it's too expensive compared to cheaper alternatives from the competition (and, as said, OpenSim is competition too!).
But it's true that they never did some serious listening to developers either. With my optimism and the belief in the general goodwill of LL, I can only think that they did listen but didn't do much about it — because what we want and need might be too expensive to implement (and take too long!), and they thought they could invest on other areas instead to compensate. Apparently none of these have paid off.
Granted, if they had invested in having 100 developers and put them all improving the technology, the cost would have been the same and we'd have a fantastic product these days — one that might have gathered the attention of corporations as well.
Still, one thing is the technology, the other is the price structure, and a further thing is the relationship with clients. LL didn't do an outstanding job on all these areas for the past year. It was better than 2008, and much much better than 2006/7, but still not good enough. Thus the results were disappointing.
I guess then that the message we're getting is: “we don't understand really the business we're in, but so long as 99% of all residents are happily making money out of SL, we'll fall back to supporting them, even if we don't really know how”. It's not the first time that a company has no clue how their market works and what their customers think but still makes money out of it
There used to be an old motto that applied to LL like a glove: “just leave us alone, stop interfering, and we'll be happy enough to pay for the privilege of being around”. That seemed to be one of the best strategies so far
An interesting aspect is that, if LL doesn't need to worry about corporations and education any more, I wonder if they will revert their Puritan stance against adult content and online gambling
Now that would boost figures again and get the economy rolling — exponentially — once more. Just keep the extra money around to pay for lawyers to fence with the Puritan groups and keep the virtual world alive 
But naw, I don't think LL will go back on that.
Yes, like adding Viewer 2 to the grid doesn't cancel out the version that people by a wide margin associate less with water-boarding, it does seem to be what is pushed and thus what noobs and sheeple will use. Also, I don't think anyone is suggesting the content is different, but if you would like to make the case building is going to be a breeze in a web browser I'm more than prepared to give that the scorn it calls for. This will be a dumber little experience.
Well now, that is sort of the point, isn't it? No one really knows what the plan is or if there is a coherent vision because either the leader is not able to articulate it, does not have it, or is not calling the shots. There is of course the possibility this is all his handiwork, but I have to question why Papa Phil would hand over the keys to such a man and watch him proceed to smash it into a brick wall backing up and repeating.
I'm not clear why we all can't just come out and say it. This man has lost the confidence of residents, of Lindens, and the people who have money riding on his judgment have to be just as concerned. At a certain point someone has to at least consider the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and wonder if Phil will stand by and watch his child be killed while he toys with love machine.
Not if he really loves it.
Nicely said, though I think your take is far too optimistic. Casual and social residential users (I don't mean content developers) can be the most fickle customers, once better or just shinier alternatives appear (the MySpace to Facebook exodus). Education and business customers, however, tend to make long-term investments in platforms.
We educators will *love* the idea of a Web-based client. Just not sure that too many schools, in this economy, will expand or even continue investments in a company restructuring in this manner, for a product with as seedy a rep as SL has outside its cloisters. Note how most of the OpenSim grids getting our business (Reaction and Third Rock) are PG grfids.
Moreover, there's a sense of being burned. Inside our educational cloister, anger still runs high about the treatment of Jokay Wollengong, the stupid handling of the folks at SLoodle, and the sacking of Pathfinder Linden. Now the company fires Claudia, a great friend to those who teach in or with SL.
I am not feeling the love from (or for) this CEO, and to pull out some tired metaphors, I don't see a plan here as much as a press release that whitewashes the bloodstains on the floor.
I hope SL survives and expands with a new client and a smarter CEO. But I'd not lay money on it.
Hey Gwyneth. Great Blog as always. *Waves her hand eagerly* I know the answer to that last question!!! ME! ME! ME! LOL The reason businesses did not buy in is because LL has a long history of stepping on toes – not just of their business and educational users, but of each and every class of user on their grid. You don't refused meetings with Fortune 50 and 500 companies and garner good will or be taken seriously in the world of enterprise business. The kind of bad will that creates runs so deep that you'll never get a chance at it again. And that's the shame of this, because its not that this could not be done, or that these people didn't want it. Its always boiled down to the arrogance factor. That whole, “You're not important enough for me to listen or respond to.” attitude.
Surprisingly, this is not the first time I've seen this. With my 15 years of working in virtual worlds – yeah I'm a bit long in the tooth – technically and otherwise – I've seen this over and over again. The fact that the owners and programmers create what essentially is utopia on a prim seems to literally give them a god complex, something I fight every day as the co-founder, COO and Art Director of my own grid, SpotON3D. Its heady stuff no doubt, but I constantly remind myself that this isn't for me or my ego. Its for the community, as I saw all this coming years ago and why we've invested so much into our own platform. I knew LL's actions would bring us here; their lack of transparency, their utter confusion over what this grid business really was about, their exasperating arrogance in the face of some of the most embarrassing management. We are creators who wanted to be sure there was a viable and sane choice if these predications did indeed come to pass.
I'm going to make one more prediction and this one publically, in light of their recent activities:
• These lay offs leave little room to progress to a Blue Mars level
• M’s press release clearly states they are going to a web page experience that doesn’t need a d/l. The only technology I know that can do that is the technology behind WebAlive, ExitReality – VRML/opengl based or IMVU, Twinity and similar “player virtual world” experiences which I think is more flash based. Please correct me if I am wrong. I've been buried alive in OpenSim for the last 18 months.
• If the above guess is a good one LL would need to provide a web based profile, so the odd purchase of United Avatar suddenly makes a whole lot of sense- why not pick up one with a growing audience? Added benefit? All those naughty profiles disappear.
• The new web page like viewer 2.0- could be a great head start on the look and feel of their new interface? Or was that just the last hoorah for the real 3D Grid?
• The purchase, facelift and now total overhaul of the SL market place – The new look is decidedly more web page friendly and certainly not something that could easily work within the client as it is now.
• LL has laid off most of its B2B employees, such as the whole SLE project staff, and the message they sent out in this last press release didn't sound like a plug for business or education.
To me, and it is just my guess, but my gut says all this adds up to a IMVU/TWINITY type web page experience. Does that mean this gird disappears? I doubt it is going anywhere soon because it does make money, but the costs are far higher than running a web page virtual experience and hardly ever results in the social drama and lawsuits we’ve seen flying all over the place the last three years. Its clear the investors want a return on their commitment and LL may not actually have too many choices in that matter.
But, this is just unthinkable, huh? Despite all the problems and hardships we all love our SL – warts and all. But now things are changing …. Again. I just thank god we have the OpenSim platform to turn to. Think how bleek this would be without that option? Without the 100’s if not 1000’s of grids wanting and frankly needing YOU there. BTW … might not be a bad idea to check out our blog today that talks about the questions you need to ask before committing to any grid.
I know some will be tempted to just throw in the towel at this point.
DON’T! SERIOUSLY! DON’T!
Ever time I’ve thought the 3D Web was dead I’ve turned around to find it coming back even stronger and this time was soooo close. It was just in the wrong hands to take it all the way. I’ll be so bold as to say – In fact I think this is really just the beginning. Without the road blocks, frustrations and disappointments we suffered through think what we’ll be able to achieve! NO more 10m limits. No more scrawny prim allowances, no more crazy rule changes without notice. We have the technology and we certainly have the talent and followers. Now we only need to come together as a community – NO MATTER WHAT GRID WE CALL HOME. We will need to travel to other grids, not to steal ideas or talk smack, but to show our support for their contribution to the community as a whole; go to that concert, participate in that contest, attend that 3D Webinar! Remember? That’s how we all started. Hand in hand, teaching each other as we went. *wiggles her hand behind her, inviting you to take hold* Ready for the next adventure? Its time to cut the apron strings and really fly folks! *-)
From what I hear around the grapevine, banning gambling was more of a proactive measure on the anti-online-gambling legislation in the US than cleaning up its image. That is, of course speculative, but it does explain why over the last year+ they have turned a blind eye to the resurgence of gambling in SL with lip-service “game of skill” cash-out systems that are a joke of a loophole.
Also – you mention mesh. I haven't heard anything *public* about mesh. Do you have a source indicating that Linden Lab is working on mesh?
Aw, Grace, awesome article, awesome article… I think I never seen SL dissected in such an analytic way before, and proposing a solution. I surely hope some upper-level Lindens themselves have read it and sent you a check for the free consulting service.
“Philip, come back, you're forgiven”? Heh. I love your analogy with Jobs, though. I'm not sure if Philip was the right CEO to lead LL into the realm of business, but he seemed to be moderately good at leading it into the real of chaotic creativity, which was the foundation upon which SL was built…
Just remember that M Linden is a long-runner. He won't give up to easily. And as we have seen last year, he's not afraid of challenges, making tough decisions, and throwing all the energy and focus of LL on a set of well-defined goals. Sure, we can now analyse if they were the right goals or the wrong ones, or if the planning was adequate — it's always easier to analyse the past than to predict the future
But, speaking strictly from my view, M Linden is an energetic CEO who knows how to pull the strings — even if he needs to use a bazooka 
It bothered me too, Vlad, even if I ultimately understood their motivation behind it: pleasing what they saw as their market — business and education, who have nightmares about “babes in bikinis on the beach”
and want everybody to dress up for Sunday Mass instead.
Now that this stupid concept is swept out of the picture, what will Linden Lab do?
I'm quite sure that having a SL that is exciting, thrilling, and naughty will target a far wider audience
but I wonder if M Linden is that bold…
Oh, thanks for your comment and your predictions, Tessa
I tend to agree, and when summing that all up, I hardly expect that LL will all of a sudden develop a Lively clone for Facebook and dump the grid and its annual revenue… lol! No, I simply can't believe that the current management is that out of touch with reality.
There are quite good VW-on-the-Web engines out there. Unity3D is a good example of something that works and has the same quality, if not slightly better, than SL. It's not the CryEngine inside a web plugin, but it certainly has the same amount of quality as LL's own rendering engine, and it works across several platforms plus the Web, and is relatively cheap to license. But it's not the only one.
I also wonder how the standardisation on the grid interconnection protocols will stand after this; people like Zero Linden were fired too.
But IBM is not going to let LL go away and play Facebook games…
My comments:
http://giulioprisco.blogspot.com/2010/06/second...
I don't think much will change in practice. I think LL is stopping going after those dinosaur organizations which could never be persuaded anyways (as you say, “the bad image of SL as a sex-only VW is too strong… The harm is done and LL cannot fix it.”, and focusing on consumers AND leaner and meaner organizations. In my post I recommend some relatively simple developments which, I believe, would make the consumer-oriented SL much more suitable for professional collaboration as well.
Aye, that's what I also originally heard, but it shows little planning — while they had offices in the UK, they could easily have created a Zindra-like subcontinent for online gambling, putting all servers in the UK, and forgetting all about it. Or, if they wanted to be even more careful, they could do the same thing as they did with banking: require the online casinos to provide a valid license (which, for instance, all online casinos set up in Europe will have). They took the easiest way out and lost 30% of the economy in one month…
Anyway… meshes… just read T Linden's article on LL's official blog: http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/...
Let me quote the relevant section:
Now, sadly, the leading programmer on the meshes has left LL, so I wonder about LL's priorities…
Unimaginative. And overloaded, traumatized, confused, shellshocked and stuck in the mud.
http://khanneasuntzu.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/w...
Hi Gwyn Thanks for your words. I juess I am the simple one. I still am happy with my friends that I can say say hi to from around the world. We hang out and a bit of fun and every now and again I make a new friend. Happy, happy.
Well, like past projects (SLE, Havok 4 upgrade, Viewer 2.0) LL's MO is to hire specialists and then let them go when they're done, and let internal devs polish it up and support it. (which doesn't work so well because the original devs know the code 1000x better) It's in Beta, so it's far enough along where they may feel they can do that. I just spoke with Alexa – head behind the Beta program for Mesh, and Alexa's still here and believes mesh will move forward.
“You can't use truth – truth uses you.” In this case the truth is that lab revenue comes from tier – something like 0.8 million usd/month, plus a small but pure profit contribution from lindex. Corporate purchases of sims are a drop in the lab revenue bucket compared to the multiple 50+ sim operations running land rentals, which operations are owned by residents and resident-owned small companies.
In talking this over with some of my colleagues and clients, the consensus is that this layoff/refocus is a GOOD move, “our world” wise. Yes, I agree, it's hard on the laid off – been there, done that, been done that.
But the impact on all of us who use the SL digital virtual environment for education, fun, play, and supplemental income is minimal FOR NOW. By cutting back on new development and focusing solely on the two true marketables (private island growth, user base growth), the lab can make SL something, well, marketable as in sell it to someone. That someone can then decide whether to invest in new development work.
In the meantime, SL staying available “as is” for the next 1-2 years is important for the overall growth of digital virtual environments. The Wright Brothers were not the first ones to invent airplanes, they just got partial credit. As some poet said, the spirit of humankind wanted there to be Flight. In this case, the spirit of humankind wants there to be 3D Web. Also, have an Open Sim project going somewhere.
I can't say the above summary is 100% right – I'd say it's as good as 80%. My thanks to my colleagues and clients with whom I talk directly, and the Most Excellent Lady Gwyneth whom I mostly read
Cheers!
Site
Hi Gwyn… I would like to think you are right about M Linden learning from his mistakes, but this paragraph from the press release just leaves me numb:
“According to Kingdon, the restructuring also better aligns Linden Lab with its two longer-term goals. First, the company aims to create a browser-based virtual world experience, eliminating the need to download software. Secondly, Linden Lab will look to extend the Second Life experience into popular social networks.”
He wants to create a browser version? Why not make it possible for an avie to walk across a sim boundary without losing control with walking typhoid (my term). That's just one of my pet peeves.
I think M Linden has no understanding of what his residents want. and I'm afraid he'll continue to learn from his bad ideas.
FWIW, Yordie
HI Tessa… it's hard to not feel like saying to hell with LL & SL. if there was an alternative i'd leave SL today. but i enjoy SL, even with all the warts. So, i guess i'm just not angry enough yet to leave. FWIW, Yordie
You're a developer, Sitearm. 90% of the people in the lab who cared about developers are gone. How is that good for you?
How can you POSSIBLY say the impact to educators is minimal when Pathfinder, Blue, Claudia, and Cyn are gone? What are you THINKING!?
Hey Ron; Here's how I think
1. No offense but LL staff have NEVER provided substantive help in any true RL project that I've worked with. They've cheered us on and publicized other people's work like crazy. And that's been a good thing. If you've received substantive help then good on you. But it's not been a general possible lab service.
2. When I DARED to state a year ago that sim owners know better how to market their applications than LL staff do, they were mortally offended.
3. To prove their point, they proceeded, no offense, to do NOTHING substantive even more earnestly.
But I don't blame them. As stated above what LL does best is provide a service for the rest of us to build on. There was never anything wrong with LL developers and advocates, except that there could never be as many of them as there are NON-LL developers and advocates. Like us. In fact the BEST lab programs I've associated with are those that cultivate, and CONTINUE to cultivate good relations with us.
For me, “developer” has nothing to do with being a part of the solution provider program but everything to do with those of us who create in SL.
If you texture, build, script, or make clothing; and if you sell or don't sell it; it is irreleveant – in all these cases you create, you develop, you are an artist in the digital virtual environment medium. And the medium is what LL provides, not the content.
And for those of us who sell our services, we know better than LL how to market them. And LL now knows that. They'll continue to cultivate and advocate any and all uses of SL – but their focus has to be on selling more sims and aquiring and retaining more active residents. And that's a good thing for us, too.
Pathfinder and Blue and Claudia and Scott were great Advocates for SL. I intend to stay in touch with them as many of the rest of us do. Heck, I follow EVERYONE who was with the lab – they rock!
Cheers!
Site
Agree with the marketing, however that's only one part of what the education and business focused Lindens did. Pushing internal agendas for features we want, outreach and education about the platform, guiding new organizations into SL, assisting communication between organizations, etc. These things are crippled with the edu and enterprise people getting cut.
I have to disagree- this is not about focusing on the residents. Look at some of the people laid off, IE: Babbage. One of the few that paid attention in the JIRA- and was working on what is probably the worst bug in SL- the sim freezing with mono scripts being rezzed. If they cared about residents, then they wouldn't be laying off the people who were working on fixing bugs that drive the residents nuts.
Gwyn, this is extremely well laid out, and indeed you manage to have an almost insider's perspective, but there's some wishful thinking on your part going on. In 3 words: Babbage is gone. This is not a typical stepping back routine. Of course, he's just an example: alongside him, lots of experienced developers and other people that really understand the platform are gone.
Organizations are made out of people. You can't simply kick out your organizational knowledge and say you are “refocusing”. You lose agility, you lose the ability to do new things.
For me, the most obvious consequence of this is that LL will be unable to significantly improve the platform to keep up with the constant flood of novel developments in the market. Sure, they will release lots of new stuff as usual, since whatever developers are left are still highly skilled types – but definitely there should be some lack of room for putting speed on new developments that aren't started yet (unless they opt to go the Google way and let some of them have personal projects on the side that eventually become Linden Lab's Labs
… but that's besides the point).
So, I see this as a typical corporate management move: increase the bottom-line for the next quarter or annual results, get investors interest as a consequence, leverage that interest into new cash, and then think on your next step.
It could work. Or not. With the increased use of OpenSimulator grids, with Unity becoming ever more interesting, with OnLive around the corner, perhaps the day will come where SL's community is quite smaller than a hodge-podge of interlinked communities that created the Web/metaverse of virtual worlds, and LL may become the little company that could…
That is the high-stakes gamble they are taking, in my view: getting new cash within a year, losing another year attracting fresh talent (mostly inexperienced talent, of course) and giving it traction, and see where they stand in 2013. M may be elsewhere by then, of course, after several highly positive quarter reports.
Meanwhile… two years in this area? It'd make me nervous if I was relying entirely on LL.
I think Gwyn's point is more “they really don't care about Enterprise and Education”, and while the focus is consumer users, I imagine they had to cut more jobs than just those areas. I know and respect Babbage a lot – but he's literally 1 of about 100 people who were fired.
Thanks for providing such a clear narrative. It really helps put recent events in the longer term context. Given the record revenues you mentioned that were confirmed in a Mark Kingdom's WSJ interview today (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/06/10/second-l...), I hope they gave the people they laid off a very generous severance package.
I have to agree with you Gwyneth – Unity3d is an excellent example and yes, with all the bells and whistles turned on it rocks. Have you seen the latest images with the deferred rendering? WOW! Not sure what that means – deferred rendering- have to have one of my tech guys fill my brain with that logic – BUT its stunning.
But again, biz and college computers are usually 3 to 7 years behind the technology of these things. That's a good and bad news thing, as it gives us time to watch the market and see what really works before we hope onto and try and consume and integrate it into our systems. Bad news is, that means our business applications will also look a bit lackluster by necessity- the gamers of the world will forever be picking on us for being lame *sigh* If only we could please the whole world? Ahh what a bright spot that would be!
We're actually about to enter into talks with some folks from the Unity dev communicty to see if there is fertile ground for interoperability or at least interportation between SpotON3D's OpenSim based platform and Unity. Problem is, if we're to offer something to users and enterprise level offerings then you somehow have to meet all their needs, and I'm not entirely sure that can be done with the framework of Unity alone – enterprise likes full ownership or at least a very liberal license. They want ultra secure environments that offer different levels of access – a more layered accessibility, which is something we've worked hard to pioneer, as you know. They also demand branded content at least for their internal and marketing materials. Visitors I think too well be asked to wear or initiated into the company virtual environ with branded clothing, but in time Fortune 50-500's will ease up and give their outside guest more freedoms I think. That's where our cross delivery of goods system comes into play, because corporate & edu wants to pick and choose what users can pull out from their private inventory of clothing. Since Unity has no systems in place to address these issues it would need to be added, as we have with SpotON3D and Opensim. Unity will be a much more labor intensive investment than opensim was to get this done, but from the looks of it, could be well worth the venture.
Unlike you, I really do worry that LL is kinda like a fish out of water, flipflopping all over the place. There is that little sense of desperation and damage control in this last press release, yes? For those who would translate my predictions as gleeful, tsktsktsk. I LOVE SL and have always said it would be around for 20 years and pointed to Active Worlds, Bluxxun and Worlds.com as an example of the longevity of virtual worlds that create a very loyal user base. Our whole message is it can't be about one grid. That's not realistic. This is the 3d web. No one company can own and operate it and that includes us. But the reality is, as implausible as my 'abc .. 123 = guess/prediction' might seem, we never ever conceived of There.com or Forterra or Metaplace of Sims going poof either, so I think we'd be foolish to close our eyes to the possibility of the unthinkable. You can't let the information rule the day, but you best not ignore it either me thinks. That's how you get caught with your pants down.
That is what i love to hear Yordie. No need to really leave. But if you run a virtual business or see a reason to invest a real world business through virtual, its important to expand, because there are tremendous new markets opening up for everyone. Hang in there!
Your affection of M ( be it felt or the reality of your business) is something I respect. People are turning on him left and right, so for you to go the other way takes round objects not mentioned.
Papa Phil is a lot like Steve in that he is in many ways a dreamer and not a businessman. I can't say I was 100% content with moonbeam at the helm and less with briefcase boy. I guess I want that person who has the vision tempered with reality since one is too native and one has no emotions.
What I need to join you is a sign that our captain can be a leader and he cannot close the deal with me. The day after the cuts he needed to send a sign he was on the right path. To come out renting voice morph shows me he still does not get it.
Look, I am dumb as a stump, but were I M Linden I would face the fact that given a vote, a majority of residents who want me dropped off naked in the middle of a Gor RPG. Knowing that I could not burn money, I would try to mend fences, rebuild bridges, etc, by bringing back even the symbolic like a resident advisory counsel (which has no power), make premium accounts at least seem more important with special tags or such, and do the one thing may be heard on a CEO ego, but is needed…
“M Linden here. Look, I took my eyes off the ball. I focused on enterprise and I was wrong. I know you guys are what makes Second Life what it is and I promise to get this thing back on course. I'm going to start meeting with groups of residents to get some input. Please let me know if you want to be part of this.”
I do wonder how a refocus on “consumer” can play well when a large proportion of the people who really “get” the communities represented in Second Life, and have deep connections to them, have just been let go.
Most of the educators I know in SL aren't there because their whole university made a decision to use SL. They're individual professors, instructors, and educational technologists experimenting with using SL to help them with teaching this class or that. They tend to get more help-with-SL from other educators using SL than from their institution. That is, the actual educators in SL are more independent-individuals than institutional-employees. If Linden Lab stops targeting whole educational institutions, there will be little effect on those educators who have been in SL on their own all along.
(There are exceptions, like the University of Texas system, but they're exceptions.)
Babbage Linden lives in the UK and the press release said “The software development teams will be consolidated in North America…” Maybe Linden Lab offered to move him to North America but he said no? I was rather looking forward to being able to use C# constructs to do SL scripting. Sigh… (These days, I tend to do heavy lifting on servers outside of SL anyway, with HTTP being used to talk back to SL as needed.)
Ahh … Sorry Grace! You got there first with this one, huh? The IMVU possiblity? Didn't mean to try and steal your thunder. Hadn't read your take on things yet, but suffice it to say we seem to be circling each other, with you pointing out other supporting factors as to where M should go. I just think they already had this in their head as a possible path when they bought United Avatar. I didn't see the viewer 2.0 connections – thought it was a last hoorah for the learning curve- but, ya know what? you're argument sounds far more convincing. Thanks for the insight.
The three people who should not come back would be Philip, Robin, and Cory. Philip's idea of “pick your own work” was utopian, but in practice, the place felt like it had little adult supervision when I worked there in 2006. “pick your own work” often meant that the problems that needed some urgent solving did not get addressed. As for Robin, she was in over her head — most of her policy declarations had to be explained and revised 2 or 3 times.. go back and look at her history. Finally, Cory was not much a tech leader, and made some pretty bad tech decisions.. LSL is a glaring case of a poor language for the task, and scripters have been cursing it for > 5 years. It took until 2010 to get shared media working…
I look to OpenSim for technical leadership, and would not be surprised to see something of an increased migration of residents and companies to that platform. The idea of SL appeals to us, but the company behind it continues to misstep. In the end, a focused community, akin to those who developed Apache, are going to be the ones that lead the way forward. The idea of SL is too important to be entrusted to any one company.
Gwyn, I doubt the Lindens are really doing as you say, and if you are happy that at last they are going to “serve the community,” gosh, we all have to worry, because you have the same sectarian notion of community and “community needs” that has kept this platform crippled for years and is the very reason why they had to make painful cuts.
And oh, bullshit, Sidewinder. Once again, you take the “community” for yourself and your friends and your fellow geeks who have your peculiar perspective. The people who “get” that community are destined to keep SL a ghetto for ever. I'm not sure they were cut for that reason, but if they are gone now, good. You can't tell me that Blue Linden, who couldn't manage the teen grid and let inept Linden concepts, insider deals with Teen FIC, is “deeply getting” the community. He's not. He's “deeply getting” the powers that be. You can't tell me Blue Linden, who deletes my post about inworld stores that could easily satisfy the quality needs of SLE, but he was “deeply getting” what the powers that be wanted — crushing of independent inworld business and celebration of “solutions providers”. And Pink — well, we all know about her savaging the Xstreet actual community, and “deeply connecting” to her own Xstreet merchant FIC. And so on and so forth. Not community. Not connection. Just the usual self-serving circle-jerk we've seen for years from this gang. Time for a change.
You consider this “re-focusing on the consumer market” as a positive development. But to me it seems more of a Farmvillization of SL. Consumers, yes, but not the same consumers of a few years ago. Not passionate SL evangelists and committed creators, but casual visitors with attention deficit.
This doesn't add up to a bit of streamlining and getting rid of one division, the search team appear to have gone, admittedly they weren't exactly popular, but they were a team who were resident facing. Blue, Pink and Babbage aren't enterprise people, indeed Pink was leading the charge to the new marketplace and Tom Hale appears to be missing from the management list (although Cyn is still there and she's gone). This goes a lot deeper than getting rid of the enterprise division and it's far from encouraging.
“But, speaking strictly from my view, M Linden is an energetic CEO who knows how to pull the strings — even if he needs to use a bazooka
”
IMHO, 100 people did just suffer from M. Linden mistakes, my opinion is that he should have left.
I didn't read her take on this as necessarily a “positive” development at all. I think Gwyn is describing a situation, without editorial.
As for “casual visitors with attention deficit” – I think Linden Lab knows that immersive, 3-D worlds aren't good medians for these folks. While I may charge them with lack of foresight in the business and educational spheres, many of us have been pushing SL to adopt interactivity with social media for years. Second Life is good at getting people to “come and hang out”. I suppose with the variety of things in SL, you can offer a certain level of rapid “let's go to fun place X” choice, however, it's still not the same as the ADD that flat-web surfing can cater to.
I can't speak for others, but going through a portal to a game from which I can bring back trinkets that supposedly will make me the envy of all SL doesn't appeal to me. If I were interested in games, I'd play them–but I don't want to be told what to do; I don't care to jump through hoops or get through a maze someone has set up. I'm not interested in grinding through enough levels to fight and defeat the final boss. Computer games are for those who need to be told how to have fun.
Casual visitors don't buy land not buy L$, which are LL's main sources of revenue
No, they need to engage consumers to become spenders… and that meana not getting merely casual visitors.
Check out this one, they are in a strategic partnership with AMD. They have a streaming technology that goes through the cloud, no dl and no plug ins. Runs games and worlds and apps on any device capable of running a browser. AMD currently have (according to them) the fastest graphics servers on the planet. With configurations that perform 1 Petaflop per second. This would of course require server side rendering. But if LL went this route they would not even have to maintain the servers. I also think many big companies will be going to server side rendering for the huge benefits it offers. Consistent user experience across a wide range of devices. A decrease in distribution costs, massive decrease in theft in addition to be able to output consistent content without having to produce software for every different device.
The Otoy version say they have raytraced reflections, shadows, and awesome lighting in real time. I hope they go for something like this. Also great article Gwyn.
http://www.otoy.com/#/news/
Wow, this is quite interesting!… Granted, Avatar Reality did say they'd do something like that (server-side rendering on a cloud) for Blue Mars, to make it readily available on underpowered computers, to which LL replied that they could do something similar if they wished (which I believe was just a bit of bloating…)
Gwyn, this is really a first rate article in my opinion and very convincing.
On your final question, I can speculate too. I think corporates would answer: er, in 2006-07 we were awash with cash in an uber-boom, and now we're…well, we're not.
Loving your work
Keks
Who are you, Daniel? Somebody who worked at Linden “Labs” as you continue to write on your public resume at your vanity site daniel.org (?!) for only a few months. You're hardly a source of inspiration, but just the usual arrogant tekkie to walk up to this project and swagger around and imagine you can save it — and then you quit or are let go pretty soon.
Philip is an engineer who understands the vast and complicated systems and at least as a vision. You don't.
Your dissing of Robin seems incredibly malicious and misplaced. Even very diverse constituents in the community found her helpful and inspiring. I often found her to be the only grown-up in what was a place full of kids. What on earth are you referring to as far as “policy decisions that had to be reversed or explained”. VAT? Well, there's a simple reason for that: the Europeans screeching and howling about this are amateur babies who don't realize that nobody has to pay for their socialism but they themselves. If the socialist governments they've elected to get their socialist benefits want VAT, then outsiders have to pay it and collect it from customers, not take it out of their own pockets like another extra source of socialism for Europeans!. An American company can't reduce a cost and make an unlevel playing field with the largest group of its customers (Americans) just because some Euro whiner can't grasp politics and economics and wants another free lunch. The Lindens all followed a practice of floating a policy to see how much screaming it produced, then adjusting it, so Robin was merely following an established leadership policy and practice on that. But I'd like to hear what your examples are because it makes no sense.
Everybody gets that the “pick your own work” stuff is for the birds. It comes from faddish management practices like Theory of Work by Tom Malone. I've castigated it as Leninism and collectivism many times. If one person gets up and says “I want to make sparklies,” and they are indulged in the making of sparklies while teleports don't work, the world can't function it needs a mandate and tasks and individual responsibilty and gets none of that with the goofy California collective all working in one giant distractive barn with constant “transparency” that only leads to more elaborate forms of lying.
Cory I have no use for, as I don't see that he contributed anything technologically or ideologically, except for fanatical opensource bullshit that led to first allowing libsecondlife to reverse engineer the viewer, then blessing their griefing and stalking and theft and setting the stage for Copybot. By his own admission, he wrote LSL in a weekend.
Who cares about shared media? Go in your other window and watch Youtube in the other window if you must.
Here we go again with the fake story of the fake migration to OpenSim. We've never seen it because it's a sterile sandbox with no economy, no respect for IP rights, no DRM to create the necessary substrate to protect them, no nothing but the usual collectivist hustle and shill. Apache? Who cares. The Internet doesn't run because it involves Apache, the Internet runs because of proprietary companies from ebay to amazon to Apple. More and more, people are on their phones in APIS, and not “on the Internet”, that old collectivist sandbox you are trying to artificially resuscitate.
SL Is so important that it has to be trusted to one company that isn't an interoperating opensource fanatic destroying the economy and people's livlihood. It should reform and increase democratic governance and the rule of law, and over time, become part of an ecosystem of other such private and public entities, government and corporation and nonprofit, that make up the Metaverse. It's about one company now, and not about Open Sim which is not viable for people except IT nerds who already have another source of income from personal wealth, Mom, or their Big IT companies.