So it seems things sometimes can happen when you really ask for it…

The cart where the 130 Lindens took place also made a stop at Mark Kingdon’s office and took them all for a new adventure… In French we use the word “charette” to talk about a lay-off, and a “charette” is this old open cart which used to take the aristocrats to the guillotine during the revolution… Fortunately no one should be guillotined here. Mark Kingdon surely tried his best, considering Second Life is such a different “product”, and actually I really wonder if Second Life is a product… It is in a way, but maybe you need a really 2.0 or 3.0 Marketing approach here, considering the community is really judge and part of the product.

Anyway, as I explained in my post “Second Life, engage me one more time!”, the place is cleaned and fit, and the Lab can start to work again. And they need it to be fast enough to stop the hemorrhage and reconquer both old resident hearts’s and new young hearts…
What is there in the head of Philip Rosedale? How do you feel after you stopped working on what was your motivation during so many years? How do you feel to return?

“Our thinking as a team is that my returning to the CEO job now can bring a product and technology focus that will help rapidly improve Second Life. We need to simplify and focus our product priorities—concentrating all our capabilities on making Second Life easier to use and better for the core experiences that it is delivering today. I think that I can be a great help and a strong leader in that process.

It is an honor to have a chance to help more directly again, and I come to this mission with energy, excitement, and an open mind about what we need and how we need to do it. I want to see Second Life continue to grow, amaze, and change the world. It’s what gets me up in the morning. Despite the challenges of such a big change, I am happy to be drafting this blog post while sitting in our San Francisco office, surrounded by the many Lindens who have made it all possible. »

Hopefully, that 2 years break was a time for Philip to resource, learn and take strength because he will need it. We all know when the community will have finish to rejoice, critics and resistances will come as usual.. And we also guess lots of things are in the pipe and that only a man with a deep inside vision is able to break the walls.

3 keys for the next 100 days.

As politics say, next 100 days of the new realm will be crucial in designing the future, even if we all know that the complexity behind Second Life forbid us to think it can be achieved in 100 days… Qui va piano va sano… but sometimes situations are willing men to take risks… and anticipate the moves as in a chess game.

My deep thought is that accessibility is a major key for a success. We definitely need to have :
- a Second Life for everyone, for residents, for education, for enterprise.
- a Second Life accessible no matter what is your system, firewall, terminal, etc.

Second key is called customization. I want to be able to build my own screen and design my own experience of Second Life, according to my needs. Compared to Ajax UI, Viewer 2 is pushy and generate lots of disorder if you use it multitasking. So the viewer should naturally leads to :
- an interactive, immersive and stable platform able to offer its residents all means to choose what and how they want to use it, and all means to create and produce content.

What about if third key would be the cool old long tail effect based on the fantastic collective intelligence that only Second Life residents can provide. Not only it would take part of a natural process of governance but it would also allow Second Life to definitely take the lead on its competitor.

Adoption and engagement will come naturally if the Lab is able to lead Second Life on those tracks, and give us a new kind of future called My Second Life, my world, my imagination…(does it ring a bell?)


I am born in a culture where idolatry was a sin and I definitely reject all kinds of cult of personality. But talking about Philip Rosedale’s soul last week, was a true feeling. Second Life is a piece of Philip’s soul and right now, Second Life cannot work without Philip Rosedale. That is a fact than Linden Lab’s board has realized. No matter if they are about or not to organize a beauty contest and sell the Lab. For sure, there is money and politics involved here too, but the whole story is also about a dream, and dreams are powerful, can move mountains especially when leadership is based on solid and complementary partnership. Think about Louis XIV and Colbert, or on a lower level, Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Berger. Big projects are made of realism and dreams. Second Life definitely needs both, to achieve its goal. Your dream Philip, and our dream too… Let’s make it happen together.

|

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Did I miss something ? Sometimes I think my english language escapes from me to hide away things that I would naturally see in french… But no, I think I did not, things are just the way they seem to be. We entered in a new era and we are going to adjust, as usual.

This week end, while I was writing the last post, Engage me again, I went thru the readings of a lot of twitts and blog posts, to see what was the general mood. Coming out of those, were a lot of doubts, a lot of anger, like if everyone was deeply concerned by what happened last week. M. Linden was often seen as the bad guy of the film. Some were even calling Philip Rosedale to come back. But Philip was silent, M. Linden was short on his post and his letter, and the rest of the team was not responding to mails… Maybe they were all watching the football worldcup…

So Clara decided to go to SL to see how was the mood inworld and to catch up with a few friends. Or maybe just go and work on some new trees. The problem is that when you work out of virtual worlds to promote virtual world, you gradually end up losing the sense of it. When evening comes you rather want to keep it quiet, away from the computer, away from work… Hanging around the sad Linden graveyard at Rouge, Clara met a friend she has not seen for a while, and started a conversation about life and jazz, then solved a few problems with lands, and end up exploring the forest of Leni and Timmi. A couple was riding a horse, a fairy was flying the site, avatars were popping in. And Clara finally started to design a pine-tree. No noises from the outside world, no conversations about the lay-off. The world was just going on its own way. And one more time the magic was there, in the smooth breeze of the wind… there was the soul of Philip Linden.

Early morning, I opened the Second Life website from a browser which I do not usually use, (which means where I am not logged in), and fell on the new home page of the website. A nice graphic and  motion welcome interface, including full panoramic machiminas. As I clicked to join as a noob, I was proposed to choose between 3D very real animated characters (maybe it is in test, because I could not find it again). So far away from the world we found in 2006. But so close to what is our world, our imagination… Today’s world, in all its facets…

The words of Philip Rosedale, talking at SLCC 2007 in Chicago came back to my mind.

« (extract from Virtual World News) (…) I think as a company we’re at a transition point. Part of that is the size of the room, the number of people building, and so on. We’re at a very interesting point here. The company that built Second is called Linden Lab. And on a bad day, you might feel like the subjects of the lab. Labs are organizations that have a vision about what can make the world better and then will try them out on people, unsuspecting or not, to try and make it happen.
Here’s the point. Second Life is exceedingly complicated, and it’s a dream that people have tried to make happen for years and many of them have failed to achieve the critical mass and spark that we have now. We got there now because we were a Lab. We were a small group of people willing to work very fast with little concern for the troubles people would face using it.
(…)We haven’t tipped yet. Everyone is always jumping ahead and eager to say that the future has arrived. We’ve built the metaverse, and we’re all going to walk in and disappear. We’re still building it. I think some of you here, and even I, don’t appreciate how big these things can get. I worry about crashes and revenue with my head in my hands, and I don’t remember how big these things can get. We’re just the first people to the party. This is an incredibly small phenomenon right now. This is something everybody on the earth is going to use. 
This is bigger than the Web. That’s a bold statement. How can I defend the statement that what we’re all working on is going to be bigger than the Web. (…)

One year after, at Tampa, Philip had given the lead to Mark. Second Life had to become a serious business to keep the leadership of the new born industry. Philip Rosedale seemed sad (like if some light was out of him) but resigned. I guess it is like to see your child going away from home. But, unless Steve Jobs who claimed he was fired of Apple, Philip Rosedale was proclaiming that this was the right choice… and if you think of how SL was before and what it is now, you can see that Mark did a lot to professionalize Second Life, and I think he could do so because he did not have the same history with the residents. The resistance to change, especially when the relation to SL is so affective, must be a real challenge.

Reducing the Lab team to make the vision happened, targeting new populations to enter in the platform and bring new blood and energy to the world of Second Life, accelerating the move to make virtual worlds bigger than the web, all of that was also the will of Philip Rosedale.

Strange thing though is that we feel something is missing. We can’t say it with words, it is just a feeling, irrational and empirical. The magic is still around, the possibilities are infinite, the challenge is everyone’s, but it seems that the soul of Philip is away... maybe watching the football games...

|

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•