The Humble In The Jungle

Rod Humble’s departure has created a buzz, which is rather bizarrely being aided and abetted by Linden Lab’s lack of communication. This is one of the rare moments when their lack of communication may actually be useful.

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has a post about what Rod Humble achieved during his years at Linden Lab but teases his readers with:

I haven’t received any official word from Linden Lab about the departure of their CEO Rod Humble …. but my guess is we’re about to get such a word (along with even larger news, perhaps), very soon. 

I don’t know what to make of that at all but it certainly piques the interest. The Opensim crowd have been quick to have their say on Rod Humble too, although many seem to want to pick up on issues that happened long before Rod Humble was at Linden Lab, such as interoperability and going back to the days when a proof of concept was made between Second Life and Opensim. Maria Korolov of Hypergrid Business has a post along these lines but which is presented in such a way that it’s well worth a read: An Open Letter To The Lindens.

The post discusses more than just teleports, it talks of business models, platforms and missed opportunities. Some will agree with large parts of the letter, others will disagree but there are some really well made points in there.

The Second Life Marketplace doesn’t need to be limited to Second Life. Right now, there is no viable multi-grid content marketplace for OpenSim, though Kitely Market is expected to open up to other grids in the next few weeks. But even if it does, the Second Life Marketplace would still overshadow it in terms of the amount of content available, even if only a fraction of merchants opt to enable the multi-grid delivery.

I can recall making a similar point to Pink regarding the potential for the Second Life marketplace selling to other grids, she didn’t shoot the suggestion down in flames. There could be potential there but with the recent tax and account issues I think Linden Lab are likely to shy away from selling content or trading virtual currencies anywhere but their own backyard.

Elsewhere the discussion has moved on from Rod’s departure to other virtual worlds, with Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity being mentioned in quite a few places, including a discussion on the cloud party forums regarding the closure of cloud party where someone commented that they would rather wait for High Fidelity than go back to Second Life, others however are saying they will be back in Second Life. I really need to stop calling it Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity, it makes it sound like a book or movie.

I’ve seen tongue in cheek speculation that Yahoo are going to buy Second Life … actually that may have been my tongue in my cheek now that I think about it. I’ve also seen a lot of disagreement as to whether Rod Humble did a good job or not and that’s fine, healthy disagreement is good.

However we’re getting towards the point where Linden Lab could do with calming people down a little, there has been a good degree of fun, ribbing, speculation and some good and bad tempered commentary around, but now, it would be nice for Linden Lab to just acknowledge on their blog that they know they’ve lost their CEO. Which reminds me, Gamespot have covered the departure of Rod Humble with a headline of : Second Life loses its CEO, in the comments, amongst the traditional style “Second Life is still around” comments, which are utterly predictable, is this gem:

Is someone going to at least look for him?  He’s probably outside somewhere, scared and alone.

Well it made me laugh anyway! Anyway, Linden Lab, enough with the fun and games now, talk to your people and show them some love.


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