Whereas Jack Linden’s departure was announced on the blog to a largely disappointed public, another senior Linden has quietly departed. Joe Miller (Joe Linden), the VP of technology and platform development no longer appears on the Linden Lab Management page. This was reported by the very astute Tateru Nino, who tracks these changes with the assistance of Linden Lab’s Second Life grid databases.
I’m not sure when exactly Joe departed from the management structure, recently enough to find him still listed in a cached version of the management page, so it can’t have been that long ago.
Joe was a Linden whom I can’t recall ever having any contact with, he was however one of the five members of the executive management team, that team is now down to four.
Joe had been at Linden Lab for at least five years and his work included overseeing development of the client, including the latest version 2 client, the open development program, technology partnerships and next generation technologies. These are important areas. There may be a link to Jack’s departure here, as the word on the street is that Joe was Jack’s boss.
I’m not familiar with Joe, as I said earlier, indeed he competed with Cyn as the most quiet senior Linden, I’d say Joe won that one, Cyn did used to make rare public appearances.
What does all this mean? Who the hell knows, people change jobs all the time, the new CEO may have his own plans regarding the areas Joe and his team covered and that may be why these changes are happening, he may have found a better job, it’s nothing to get too concerned about, although like Jack, I hope Joe has landed on his feet, they have both put a lot of effort into Linden Lab and whereas we may not all like the results, between them they’ve put in a lot of years of service into this product that we enjoy using.
Going back to the manangement page I see that Kim Salzer is there as VP of Marketing, Kim of course headed over from Activision Blizzard in August this year and there’s also the new legal eagle of Lisa Berry, who replaced Marty, I think it was Marty!
So there are changes afoot, again, I’d expect to see a few new management positions filled once Rod Humble gets his feet under the table, it will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months but we really need to be heading towards a period of stability, 2010 has been a bit of an annus horribilis for Second Life and Linden Lab, but I’ll write more about that before the end of the year.
For now, best of luck to Joe Miller.
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