As revealed yesterday, Rod Humble has departed Linden Lab after three years at the helm as CEO. Who the new Linden Lab CEO will regenerate as is not yet known, but Rod was the third or fourth regeneration of the Linden Lab CEO. This depends upon whether you count Bob Komin’s temporary stint as CEO. Fans of the franchise are divided upon whether Bob Komin was a legitimate regeneration.
Linden Lab announced Rod’s arrival in December 2010, although it is my understanding that he officially started work in January 2011. There was also a blog post in January 2011 when he arrived in Second Life in a toga. Early in his tenure he gave an impressive interview with Rock,Paper,Shotgun in which he explained some of the positives of Second Life:
What makes Second Life so intriguing to me is its hard to define nature. I have heard people call it a virtual world, a game, the 3d internet, a social media platform.. the list goes on. I like that kind of unresolved ambiguity, I think it shows something that is not yet fully evolved and has exciting new roads to discover.
That interview also revealed that Rod had worked at Electronic Arts for six and a half years, which was the longest period he had worked anywhere, this is worth bearing in mind considering the recent news. Just shy of a couple of years into his tenure Rod gave another interview, this time to Giant Bomb, which shed light on this reasons for joining Second Life in the first place:
“When I was thinking about leaving EA,” said Humble during a recent meeting. “I was going to do my own company, and it was going to be around creative spaces–games that emphasize creativity tools more. When the opportunity came up and Linden Lab got in touch…first of all, Second Life? Is that still around? [laughs] I looked, and it was really, really healthy. Also, it was a company that was ready made to do a whole bunch of other products, which I wanted to do.”
This is also worth bearing in mind as Hamlet’s blog post on Rod’s departure includes his Facebook announcement about his departure in which he says:
I am starting up a company to make Art, Entertainment and unusual things! More on that in a few weeks!
Which sounds like he’s doing the sort of thing that he wanted to do before joining Linden Lab, the sort of thing he thought he could do with Linden Lab. Rod’s time at Linden Lab looks, on the face of it, to have been very good. He expanded the Linden Lab empire and put the Lab back into the Linden. However there were downsides during his reign.
The downsides revolve around policy and communications. Recent policy decisions such as the terms of service debacle will leave some with a bad impression of Rod. Another issue has been the tax and account issues that have recently arisen. These policy decisions come at a time when Linden Lab’s communication with their community have hit an all time low. I find myself having to poke Inara Holmes into sending a telegram to Gray Of The Lab in San Francisco to get answers all too often.
This lack of communications, user group meetings for community reasons and having to drag information out of the Lab kicking and screaming has caused great consternation, confusion and indeed anger amongst the community, which could have been avoided had Linden Lab engaged with said community.
However the pluses of Rod’s reign far outweigh the minuses in my view. He expanded Linden Lab so that they now have products such as Versu, Dio, Blocksworld, Patterns, Desura etc. Not all of them will be a success, some may stumble but Linden Lab are now known for more than Second Life and for Linden Lab as a company, that’s a bloody good move.
Second Life though is the main money earner for Second Life, it’s their star product. In terms of Second Life Rod Humble’s reign was indeed impressive. We saw the introduction of Mesh and then later, Materials, to allow content creators to create new and improved products to make Second Life look modern. For example old builds from the pre-mesh period do in some cases look dated.
There were hardware improvements galore, Linden Lab engaged in their largest ever capital spend during his period, improving the architecture behind the scenes, introducing new servers. This is exemplified by the vast increase of the number of Class 8 sims on the grid today.
There have been viewer improvements, performance improvements and Monty’s HTTP project has been in the works under the hood for some time and is now coming to fruition. Therefore I find it odd to see people commenting that Rod’s reign saw too much focus on other products, Second Life was far from ignored.
There were improvements to the views, improved graphics options, making for a more pleasant experience. Not all of these attempted improvements worked as well as one would hope and changes to the viewer always divide opinion, but on the whole the changes were positive.
When you look at everything that happened under Rod’s reign, he comes out the right side for me. He is a man who very much believes in user generated content and I think you’ll see this theme continue with his new venture,I also wonder whether Will Wright will be involved in this new venture as he appears to have recently departed the Linden Lab board of directors.
However the communication issues, the lack of community engagement, these are important issues for Second Life users and are areas that have been sadly neglected. This is made all the more frustrating when you read the many interviews Rod gave during his time as Linden Lab CEO, he gives great interviews but those interviews were on third party sites, away from Second Life users and they will therefore have missed many of them.
Rod was of course unable to halt the decline in private regions, they slipped below the 20k mark on his watch. However I’m not sure anyone can halt this decline, Linden Lab do have a decision ahead that may mean they need to think again about how to balance revenue streams, the tier is still too damn high.
However I really want to thank Rod Humble for his time as CEO, as I said earlier, the positives far outweigh the negatives in my opinion.
I’d also like to say one last thing to Mr Humble, a thing of the utmost importance, but a last thing all the same, Mr Humble, Up The Villa!
To me Mr. Humble’s job at the Lab looks unfinished. They aquired those other companies, started new products and also the Second Life improvements. They all look like only 80% done. So to me it kind of looks like he was forced to leave. I can imagine that it was about the money. Either the board hasn’t been happy with the new products revenue wise and they didn’t want him to burn more Second Life money on them, or they blamed him for the continued loss of sims.
I’m not sure whether he was forced to leave but I agree with you that it looks like a job that wasn’t quite finished.
A small correction needs to be made in the second paragraph: you write “[t]There was also a blog post in January 2010”, but that blog post was dated 1/20/2011. Besides that, I have to say I agree with your assessment of Rod’s stint as Linden Lab CEO. He’s shown that he understands what makes SL attractive and which parts of the system and infrastructure make it slower, uglier and less enjoyable for residents.
Regarding communications, indeed the Lab keeps displaying a tendency to keep users in the dark on many issues. See how feed direct messaging was quietly, practically surreptitiously, disabled. It got disabled just as quietly as it was offered. The Lab’s track record on this matter leaves a lot to be desired.
Regions and tier are another ball game. I’m not going to join the “LL is the Enemy” brigade at all. Let’s face it; it’s not the ToS change that drives users and content creators away – very few content creators left due to the ToS change, while CGTextures and Renderosity basically engaged in gratuitous drama-whoring without having any valid reason at all, as I had explained back then. My take on region loss is twofold:
1. People believe (and I think we should consider the role that SL’s default camera offsets and the resulting huge builds play in this) that they need a whole region for their homes.
2. The global financial crisis (which cannot be fixed by LL and it’d be unrealistic to expect LL to fix it) has hit a large part of SL’s user base. From the discussions I’ve had with numerous users since I created my first account in SL back in 2006, most people in SL belong in the middle class, whose purchasing power has been slashed severely, especially in Europe. This means, in simple words, that the serfs formerly known as the middle class can no longer afford what now amounts to them as an expensive pastime. So, they are presented with the following options: (i) downsizing – from a full sim to a homestead or a piece of land on a residential sim with neighbours, or from a homestead to a neighbourhood, (ii) moving to a cheaper grid in OpenSim, (iii) abandoning their land and going on a hiatus until things get better, (iv) leaving SL for good.
As both you and Inara had explained before, it’s highly unlikely that LL will ever lower tier. Their overheads are very high, they run a few data centres, they rent space in other data centres, they have a 3-digit number of employees, and all this costs money. If they cut tier by 50%, they’ll immediately lose 50% of their income without having even the slightest guarantee that they will see enough region sales to make up for it.
Again, I agree that Mr. Humble’s tenure at the helm of Linden Lab was mostly positive. He knew what to do to make it perform better for the average user, he understood what makes virtual worlds attractive to us, and he’s technically-minded. Personally, I believe he should be remembered as one of the most competent CEOs the Lab has had in its relatively short history.
Thanks very much for pointing out the erroneous year of the blog post, I have edited that, much appreciated.
I agree that the global financial crisis has played a role, in the UK, we have seen VAT rise to 20% because of this, this is not LL’s fault but makes matters more expensive for UK SL users through no fault of Linden Lab.
I agree that a lot of improvements were rolled out in Second Life under Rod’s reign, but the Terms Of Service change will eventually cause problems for future content production.
I wonder if High Fidelity has the same “exploit for any purpose” phrase in their ToS.
-ls/cm
The TOS change was horrendous. I still feel this was due to a desire to have a one size fits all TOS and this was the TOS they needed for Desura, however that is no excuse.
I won’t forgive him for the lack of communications, It is not just about his own availability to the media or his customers, it is about the mindset that LL had under his leadership to avoid contact with the outside world at all costs. I wonder how long it will take to rid LL of that approach. I hope the new person is aware of it and does something about it because it probably has to come from the top if that sort of cultural attitude is to change.
Since it is surely still in place at the moment, how do we know the Lab doesn’t already have a new CEO?
🙂
I would imagine we’ll see an initial change in approach and then back to the same. The dip in communications and user engagement started before Rod arrived.
However maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Although the tax issue effects fewer individuals directly than the ToS kerfuffle, it has the potential of being larger. When I rent a commercial space in a building and run a business, the building owner doesn’t get involved in collecting tax on what I earn in my business, that’s my responsibility to take care of so it’s a bit difficult to see why Linden Lab should become involved in the tax collecting from residents businesses.
This comes from the IRS unfortunately. When the issue first surfaced I noticed that these issues had already arisen on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Steam and Paypal.
However those platforms provide a lot more information on why the information is required, Paypal in particular has some excellent resources.
Second Life was late to the party in many respects but again we’re back to their poor communication with regards to informing users what is going on.