I downloaded a Sinclair Spectrum emulator for the android the other week. After the initial buzz of seeing all those old game titles from the eighties my interest waned. The android is a bit clunky for such games, many games don’t work and time has not been kind to many of them. However it was a thrill at first. When I had a Speccy as a kid, so did lots of my school friends. We’d share games (piracy as my teacher scolded us, so don’t try that at home). We’d go to each others houses, we’d have fun not only due to the games but because there was also a social aspect.
I left the Speccy behind many moons ago, as I did the Commodore Amiga after that, and I have been looking to see if there’s a legal Amiga emulator but will most likely go through the same cycle as I did with the Speccy emulator, thrill, then flat and no social side to keep the interest.
As it’s my blog I can draw comparisons between the Speccy and Second Life, a bit of a stretch it may be but I can draw them. The Speccy was not the height of technology on release, there were better products around but the Speccy caught the imagination. Therefore software developers were alerted to it and stretched the Speccy to limits beyond what many thought it was capable of, Lords Of Midnight springs to mind here. The Speccy had the people and of all the ingredients that make a product a success, that is arguably the most important one.
Roll forward many years and Second Life is simply where it’s at in virtual world terms. Cloud Party has some very impressive concepts going for it. I like their royalty system on content sales whereby if you sell an asset with royalties enabled, if someone else then sells another asset whilst using your asset as part of the build, you’ll receive a royalty payment. Cloud Party has also had materials for quite a while now. Another impressive apsect of Cloud Party is that objects are not the only limiting factor in a build. In Cloud Party you can have x amount of objects, or x amount triangles or x amount of bandwidth, whichever you hit first will strike the build limit. This is a well considered concept as objects are far from the only issue when it comes to performance.
Kitely has some impressive offerings, such as putting sims to sleep when not in use due to using a cloud based system. Kitely is also not only cheaper than Second Life, but for those who may only spend a few hours a month there they have a time based billing option and under any plan you get at least one free sim to play around with.
Inworldz is also cheaper than Second Life, Jim Tarber and the team are also moving in directions Second Life isn’t, as can be seen in the Inworldz Techblog where they inform visitors they’re implementing physX and project Thoosa, which is aimed at making everything run faster and more efficiently. Inworldz has also implemented Qarl’s mesh deformer project.
However despite these advances in other virtual worlds, Second Life still has that magical community ingredient and what makes this all the more impressive is that Second Life still has the community despite the fact that Linden Lab have been actively distancing themselves from the Second Life community for a few years now.
It’s easy to argue that Second Life has a strength of community that it doesn’t deserve due to their lack of communication over the last few years. Linden Lab don’t blog about new developments, community reps don’t come into the forums and discuss issues with people. However it should not be forgotten that at one time they did and those foundations from years gone by are pretty damn strong.
With the community comes the content creators and sim developers who provide the resources for people to enhance their Second Life experience because that’s where the customers are. Other virtual worlds need more than better features and more communication from the devs and reps, they need a huge slice of luck too and that’s something that’s extremely difficult to account for.
World Of Warcraft has a similar position in MMO terms. World Of Warcraft has the community, there are better MMO’s than World of Warcraft in terms of technology, but with WoW you get to find groups for dungeon and quest runs, you get guilds, you get the multiplayer experience that newer ventures simply don’t have.
Now you may think, larger companies don’t deal with the community, but you’d be wrong in many ways. Like Cloud Party, Yahoo use uservoice to communicate with their customers and users. Blizzard regularly communicate via forums and blog posts with their community. Blizzard also put devs and customer reps into their games, there’s a dungeon you can sometimes find in Diablo III where you get to battle baddies named after the dev team as well as some bosses named after customer service reps.
Last year Blizzard, like Second Life, didn’t have a community convention. This year Blizzcon is back, virtual tickets are available for the event on November 8th-9th. Developer panels, goodies, contests and a closing ceremony featuring Blink 182. That of course is way beyond the budgetary expectations of a Second Life community convention but surely with a platform such as Second Life you could hold an event inworld at the least, with Second Life performers, developer panels and such like. Alas there is no Second Life Community Convention this year.
Yet despite this, as I said earlier, Second Life is where it’s at in terms of strong community and that’s something Linden Lab should really embrace, it’s something they should be proud of, not afraid of. Second Life will continue to prosper whilst people still want to challenge the boundaries of Second Life, whilst people still want to engage and that’s why Second Life remains the virtual world mother ship.
I have always been of the “The More The Merrier” attitude to virtual worlds, so I want to see Kitely, Inworldz, Cloud Party and Opensim ventures prosper. Choice is an important factor in this market because choice drives innovation. However it’s a long road and I hope these other ventures have the patience to see it through, if they do, they may reap the rewards for their customer relations.
Linden Lab are not a bad company, they make decisions that many of us disagree with and their lack of community participation has been a bugbear of mine for quite some time but in other areas they’ve made strides. One such area is in giving Linden Lab a higher profile. Linden Lab used to be a byline of Second Life, now Linden Lab is becoming known as a developer of multiple products, they’ve put the Linden back into the Lab, it’s a shame they aren’t putting more Lindens into Second Life but they’re clearly doing something right or they wouldn’t have the strength of community they do, let’s not forget that many a Linden is working hard to make the Second Life experience better, even if people don’t hear from them.
I couldnt agree more @–>–>–
To be honest, I think that Linden Lab has more luck than “doing something right” 🙂
They did a few things right: creating a virtual world platform for user-generated content which spans all areas (from avatars to buildings to attachments to vehicles to land to weather to scripting…); tag content with DRM (aye, the permissions system) which enables content to be sold (and this we have to thank Lessig for it — he was the one insisting that Linden Lab implemented it, back in 2002) and thus created a US$ 0.5 billion digital content industry; and they are still reasonably strict about privacy, when the whole world is moving into the opposite direction.
Then their “doing right things” trend stop.
Their luck was mostly by having a huge base of enthusiasts that, in spite of everything, still keep SL going; are still incredibly innovative with the semi-broken and feature-constrained technology; and are still excited about how content is used and sold to do things that nobody thought it would be possible in 2002 (during the beta trial).
I agree that LL is not a “bad” company. I just think that, somehow, at the lead, they have always been clueless about why they have been so lucky so far. They’re also overconfident: so far, in a decade, they managed to throw everything bad at those users, and they still don’t go away. This makes them believe that Second Life is “eternal”: no matter how evil LL’s decisions are, residents will still log in and enjoy it, even if, of course, every year people just give up fighting LL’s bad decision. But the ones leaving are not many. Enough to make a dent in LL’s revenues, but not dramatically so.
The irony is that a huge slice of LL’s employees, sometimes relatively high on the hierarchy, were/are former residents. So they knew exactly what was going on in-world, what was wrong, and how to fix it. Somehow their feedback never trickled up to the top. And this is strange, after a decade. A good leadership will not only listen to their customers, but also to their own employees who are closely in contact with the customers. Why exactly LL persists, year after year, in making bad decisions, baffles me completely.
You gave the opposite examples: companies that thrive, not because they’re “the best of the best of the best”, but because they are closely in touch with their customers, know what they feel and need, and try to move along a path that benefits their customers — and reap the rewards of longevity. Blizzard is obviously the best example, with a steady income of a billion dollars every year, in spite of not having the “best” technology, and probably beating records in MMORPG longevity.
After a decade of bad decisions at the Lab, I hardly expect things to change. I remember the bad decisions at Apple, when they kicked Steve Jobs out and, consequently, after just a few years, with failure piled upon failure, they had no choice but to reinvent the company — which gave us Mac OS X, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and who knows what else. Companies have to learn from their mistakes, even if they have a fanatically loyal userbase (such as Apple did), and specially when they’re losing money.
Second Life is like that: a group of millions of fanatics about the product, but indifferent or hostile about a company who grows, year after year, more hostile to their userbase. This is all wrong. What Linden Lab ought to do is to learn about how to engage fanatic users and reap the rewards, because that’s how niche market companies thrive. Rod Humble’s bedside reading should be The Culting of Brands by Douglas Atkin. It’s an eye-opener, and I’ll just give you a simple example: in the motorcycle business, bikers don’t respect a company that has no bikers among their employees. BMW recognised that, fired pretty much everybody, and from the CEO down to the phone tech support, everybody is a biker, thinks like a biker, dreams like a biker, and breathes biking 🙂 It was easy to forge close ties with their customers that way; as a matter of fact, the biking division of BMW does little work in marketing — they let clubs of BMW fans run the whole show, and they just lend institutional support to them. And, of course, they design wonderful bikes.
This is what Linden Lab needs to learn. From Rod Humble to the lowest Concierge, everybody at Linden Lab has to be a resident. They have to download Blender and see how hard it is to create meshes with it and upload it to SL. They need to have land plots in the mainland and get griefed. They need to open shops and try to sell content. They need to feel the lag in the clubs. They need to sponsor user-created conferences, meetings and meet-ups, formal and informal. They need to drop the “fear of favouritism”, which has strongly conditioned their participation in the community, and instead become active community members — and blog about it, and discuss their experiences in the forums. They don’t need to do that using a “Linden” surname, that’s irrelevant, so long as they get to be part of the community — and engage actively in it.
It’s not enough for them to walk around and watch the views (because they certainly do that!). They need to be imbued with the spirit of Second Life to understand the issues.
Because they don’t do that regularly enough, they’re out of touch with the community. And obviously that means they will easily make bad mistakes.
When was the last time you saw a Linden in-world, outside the Office Hours? 🙂
Talking of bedside reading, the book that has long made me think of Second Life (although it covers a period well before it was launched) is Robert X Cringely’s :
Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date
The book covers more the period you talk of when you mention Steve Jobs leaving Apple, which does go some way to explaining why Steve Jobs was kicked out, the Apple Lisa story is fascinating. The book has some questionable passages in there, such as whether Gary Kildall of CP/M fame was out flying when IBM wanted to strike a deal for an operating system, so IBM turned to Bill Gates but the whole concept that these guys struck lucky is well emphasised in the book.
Linden Lab have always seemed like an accidental empire to me, for many of the reasons you mention, but whether by luck or judgement, they do have an empire, albeit not in the same class as Apple or Microsoft.
I agree that they should be more actively involved, building, socialising, searching, changing outfits, if they were maybe they’d have realised people would want to make Mesh clothing.
Maybe if they were they’d have realised that pathfinding isn’t the best tool for a product with sim costs of USD$300 a month because something to do sims find it far harder to meet tier than something to sell sims, but Second Life really needs both something to do and something to sell sims.
I agree with you that my examples are of companies who offer better community engagement than Linden Lab but the problem was, I couldn’t think of companies who distance themselves from the community the way Linden Lab do and thrive. Despite that, Linden Lab do still have a strong community, although again,I read the old old forum archives and you can see community engagement there, I feel those early roots were strong ones and have helped the community to stay strong. I’m not at all convinced Second Life would be here today had the early years been so stand offish from the community.