Bright Canopy, the company behind running Second Life (and OpenSim) in a web browser, recently announced that they were ready for launch. An inital price of $17.00 a month was announced, with an advisory that this may change if demand exceeded expectations.
Linden Lab then blogged about the service :
This weekend, an exciting new service is launching: Bright Canopy. With Bright Canopy, you can use either the official Second Life Viewer or the Firestorm Viewer to access Second Life in your web browser, and you can enjoy great performance and graphics, without a high-spec PC.
Customers flocked to the ship on the ocean, sailing with an inventory of love and devotion for the bold new product. Alas, it quickly became apparent to the Bright Canopy that customers weren’t just going to rock the boat, they were going to tip the boat over. This was of course not the desired outcome, forcing the Bright Canopy team to blog; We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat :
We’ve had so much response that we are going to have to make a change and offer a different plan to make sure we are sustainable and can be around long enough to take advantage of much more affordable hosting options from Frame in a few months.
New signups were put on hold and Bright Canopy were transparent about what had happened :
We burned through our contingency in a few hours. We tried modifying some things, but it just wasn’t something that could be fixed with a knob. We talked over our options and looked at the numbers. In order to be able to offer a service of any sort, we knew we would have to make changes.
There will be a limited time offer of a $10 credit for the first month, meaning the first month will be $7. This is our way of thanking you for bearing with us. This offer expires 12AM SLT on Sunday, September 6th. After that, each month will be $17. The plan comes with 20 hours, and additional time is available for $0.013 per minute.
This isn’t what we planned, and making the change is hard, but we believe it is the only way to keep this service available for the people who need it.
One thing was very clear, there was a larger demand for this service than had been anticipated.
Continue reading “Bright Canopy Get The Notion That Customers Might Tip The Boat Over”
