Location: In front of Linden Lab’s in-world property

Those who know much about Second Life will tell you that Cory Ondrejka, aka Cory Linden, was co-creator of the world, including the scripting language coders use to animate objects and the in-world currency system.  CNET and others broke this story as I was e-mailing none other than SL celeb (and savvy critic) Prokofy Neva about an upcoming entry here, as to why gamers dislike Second Life so much.

Now we non-gamers have reason to gripe, too.  Ondreka is Steve Wozniak to Philip Rosedale’s Steve Jobs:  the coder and the visionary.  I’ve been worried for some time about this parallel, because it was Jobs’ hubris that nearly destroyed Apple and cost them the market to a canny, if less elegant, operating system from a little software firm called Microsoft.

In a Cinderella story, Jobs left Apple, his and Woz’s brainchild foundered, then Jobs came back to resurrect the company. Jobs, however,  was never a code-god or hardware engineer.  With Woz gone, Apple became a different company, forever. Now, will the same happen to Linden Lab?

Granted, Rosedale has an I.T. resume that would have made the young Steve Jobs green with envy, but these two boy-wonders have one thing in common: a wild visionary streak that is both exhilarating and, well, a bit dangerous.  Such individuals change the world, or fail miserable trying…

We do not know the “irreconcilable differences” that drove apart Rosedale and Ondrejka, and the digerati will be debating this matter for days.

I do know this: we members of Stability Now! have the right approach to our one issue. Linden Lab, with out without Cory Linden, must make resident satisfaction a high priority or SL will become an also-ran in the coming hot competition between metaverses.  And, as with Microsoft’s challenge to Apple by the early 90s, Linden Lab’s competition will have a product that will be “good enough” for most users.

It took Jobs’ return to Apple to bring us the powerful OS X system to our Macs, with its UNIX core.  Can Rosedale and his team keep pulling such rabbits from his virtual hat, with Ondrejka gone?  Will Linden Lab be better off with Rosedale’s proven ability to attract financial support than with Ondrejka’s ability to keep the code for SL working (sort of)?

Neva, for her well informed part, hazards to guess that:

But what’s more likely is that Philip, who has probably had to learn the hard way to curb his own extremism as a geek-turned-entrepreneur, is making the hard decisions that precede mainstreaming and “normalizing” Second Life.

I’m barely a year old in SL.  But I have studied the history of technology for years and I hope, as a person who loves an open-ended den for creativity and self-expression, that Neva is correct.  Too many creative folks have too much invested in the Linden metaverse.  Once they lose faith in the company…

Such stories not new, but the implications for the emergence of virtual worlds may be huge.

Stay tuned. 

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

At the moment I think there are two things that the lab should do:

1. appoint a new CTO fast stopping possible gossip before it actually starts
2. appoint a new CTO that takes a less visionary attempt but instead is putting customer orientation in front.

And additionally there are two things we can do:

1. See who is coming there
2. Keep the Lindens to their promise on how SL will develope in 2008

Oh man, I was waiting for this to happen!

A few months ago, as I started writing my machinima pilot tv series, I imagined the beginnings of SL to mimic the beginnings of RL in a religious sense.  Here we have “Fallen Angel” Cory cast down by God-Phil!  It’s so bibliical that I am beginning to think the Bible may actually be a recording of a power struggle over the direction of the new earth. Maybe all we need to do is wait for the next “tech-messiah”!

Just talkin.

I want to agree with you, Beebs…but let’s face facts…no consortium of universities can put up the billions of dollars needed to run something like Linden Lab.

They need big I.T. capital to keep this consensual hallucination going—-they need cashflow. This thing is not some university MOO running on one box in our back office. It’s running on thousands of servers and the code is hand-turned and in need of constant fine-tuning.

If Linden Lab does not start making a profit, it will be over, just as we saw at the end of the dot-com bubble. No degree of utopian thinking will change that harsh reality.  Metaverses are coming fast, but which ones will be the standard?

10+ years ago, when poet and hypermedia author Michael Joyce decried the point at which dot.edus were surpassed in number by dot.coms on the Web, I shrugged. Later, after his talk, I told Michael my reasoning.

It’s just business at work.  And it will be no different for virtual worlds. Education will exist at the margins, as ever.

I don’t like it, but that’s how our system works.  I just want stable margins

No doubt, the departure of one guy as talented and visionary as Ondrejka is a shake-up, but perhaps worse is the suggestion of panic I sense in the purported email - am I reading too much into it?

This does not have to be the death-knell, but SL certainly has to address resident satisfaction, and soon. That corporations have pulled out is no big deal, in fact might be a benefit in opening up possibilities.

Sure, everyone has to make a buck, but if we look closely, corporate America is not quite as creative and inspired as their rhetoric constantly claims. In fact, it’s not hard to note the homogenization of its motives, slogans and ‘visions’.

The smart move for SL and for liberal arts universities in the US would be a deliberate promotion of SL for educational and creative purposes. We need more room for ideas and experiments outside traditional educational methods and the artificial quarterly profit mindset.

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