It seems that I’m not the only one wondering the same question. Christiana Zenovka gave me at PH a link to an article, discussing how corporations are actually abandoning second life today http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/technology/5078444/Second-Lifes-span-is-virtually-over-as-firms-decide-to-get-real.html . Here is also another article discussing the same thing http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10217315-36.html and google found many more. The corporate exodus seems to be really happening… and I think it’s easy to understand why: If you are a second life citizen, how much time do you spend in some dull corporate sims that promote their boring products. I have visited Gibson guitar company sim once and collected a bunch of freebie guitar imitations there (very nice looking btw), but that’s about it.
Now LL’s new approach is to offer SL as a platform for corporate communications, and that’s what Rosedale seemed to be talking about, too. You can actually check it out yourself, since I found out that his talk is available at http://blip.tv/file/1853232 . If you look at 27:30, the camera turns so that you can see me and Loki in the front row! There are also records of the talkback in local chat at http://www.gronstedtgroup.com/pdf/philip%20linden%20talk%20-%20back%20chat%20-%20Notepad.pdf . If you search for me or Lokifluff there, you can find our questions. Unfortunately Rosedale did not answer either of us :-(
I and Loki listening to Rosedale (Philip Linden). The picture doesn't show it, but we had our GMT now! group tags on us :-)
Now what did Rosedale offer to companies? Not much (if anything) I would say. On the contrary, I would criticize his presentation in many ways:
- He was mostly talking about the user experience; SL would supposedly be great for corporate use because it allows the participants to have a visual interaction. Visual interaction would make it more engaging for brains compared to normal teleconferences (….sounded a bit weird to me, but Loki said that in principle he was making kind of sense)…. But hold on! I have every now and then video-conferences and I use MS-netmeeting to share presentations. And I don’t really need anything more remarkable than a camera and skype to establish that. So there is quite enough visual connection and it would be with rl personas rather than avatars. When I am dealing with rl businesses, it would seem even preferable for a serious person like me (…..awww don’t laugh!), so I wasn’t impressed by Rosedale's claims.
- Security is of course a main concern for companies. Without some kind of a guaranteed security and advanced VPN system there is hardly any chance to make a company to discuss it’s internal businesses in SL. And what if someone is able to spy anyway, who will be responsible? I wasn’t sure from Rosedale’s speech whether VPN works already in SL or are they only planning for it. But I think that if LL wants to promote SL as a communication platform for internal meetings, it cannot tolerate one single industrial espionage incident, or it will be abandoned by everyone immediately. Does this sound like a lucrative prospect from LL's point of view? Is internal corporate communication really that interesting business, that it would be worth the risk and investment?
- Rosedale was making also some very soft arguments about how internal promoters of SL, working inside companies could plead to CEO’s “vanity” in making her/his company to be one of the pilot users of SL. Come on Philip, don’t be childish! Even the most vain CEOs will always want to have a good financial justification why would they invest in something risky and new like SL still is. If you are not able to show where the value is in terms of hard cash calculations and what is the return on investment and that there aren’t risks….I doubt it is very hard to get any CEO to signoff for an SL type of an experiment, especially these days when cost control is everywhere tighter than ever. To be honest, I would personally advice LL to cut that kind of cheap sales talk completely when talking to actual business people working in actual corporations, since although some well presented but silly nonsense might sell to VCs (= vulture capitalists known also as venture capitalists) that are specialized in buying and selling “visionary” start-up stories, real world business people will always want to look at the substance, too. LL need to be able to show clearly what is the expected ROI, show successful case studies or a clear demonstrations of getting measurable strategic value, like getting ahead of competition. I would think that soft sales talk, like pleading CEO’s vanity, would only scare away corporate people.
- I was actually very surpised that Rosedale didn’t tell any concrete success stories about how SL has been used in business. I mean although there aren’t probably very many such stories yet, there must be some at least. For example, I heard from Nirak Treschichot at PH how SL has been used to test the functionality of hospital designs by creating making 3-D models in SL and then making avatars to use it as if it was in actual hospital use. Why did Rosedale not refer to any such cases? There must be other successes, too? If LL does not use successful cases as examples in their marketing towards corporate world, I find it very unlikely that they actually win any new corporate customers. I think that this was a big flaw in Rosedale’s presentation. If I was LL, I would collect a portfolio of success stories and use it as the key marketing collateral when approaching actual companies.
- I was also somewhat put off by the format of the event. Although there was obviously a humorous quirk in how Rosedale’s avatar Philip Linden was in the spotlights, like some kind of a messias bringing the joyous message of SL and tens of “fanboys” (Smoke Wijaya’s expression) cheering every word, I think it was somewhat tacky. The fanboys spammed so much that I didn’t notice any critical or more interesting question to get an answer really. Not good enough Philip! If you want to get serious with corporations….get serious first, answer also the difficult questions.
So based on that presentation, I didn’t get at all convinced that LL will make any progress with the corporate world, at least with the approaches they seemed to have today in selling SL to companies. On the contrary, I got the impression that they have run out of ideas… which I think is a pity! Although I am not planning to use SL for anything else but for socializing, I’m still very interested in how it could be used for business purposes, too. There is something magical with SL, as all of us SL citizens know. We love it and we hang in there an unbelievable amount of time…so I think we all would like to see SL grow and flourish.
But could it be that LL is going astray when trying to to win the RL corporate world? I think they might be. Although I’m sure that the LL management talks about this daily and like in most US companies have zillions of time wasting and badly conducted strategy meetings, where people come unprepared and talk mostly off agenda, …ooops, sorry…. hem….*calm down Q* … they should ask once more if the RL corporate scene is really worth the effort, with things like visual skype as a competitor? Where is the business model for avatar based visual corporate communication, really? SL as a marketing scene by making boring business sims has been proven to fail already.
And then there is the question of the sex scene in SL. Most RL corporations don’t want to be associated with the adult scene….since you never know that if you setup a serious corporate sim serving a conservative clientele, that suddenly there wouldn’t be a porn sim right next to your location =). So now LL is planning to move all adult content to a separate continent, where the users would need to show age verification. Perhaps that would be a good idea in principle, but it should have been realized at the beginning of SL. Pushing the separate continent idea at this point will certainly not get through without huge protests. And what’s the worst, the protesters would likely be among the oldest and probably the best paying customers from LL point of view. So if I was an LL business planner, my first reaction would be to be very cautious throwing away the old customers, before there is a clear concept how you are going to attract the new ones….but based on what I have seen so far there doesn’t seem to be much on the table when RL corporations are concerned.
The second point I think LL seems to be missing with it’s new strategy, is that the main attraction for many is that SL can be a true Second life! It allows a person to have a second identity that is not connected directly to the responsibilities of the first one. For example I, Quintessential Sorbet, can be much more straightforward with many issues related to corporate world than my counterpart in meatspace. She needs to think what her employer might think of her activities as an economical columnist, and she has so many personal boundary conditions here and there….poor girl =). I think that the concept of a concrete Second personality was on of the key elements in the original vision when SL was created. I would not abandon that vision for the sakes of hypotethical RL corporate customers, especially when given the competition from skype and other netconferencing systems, the opportunity seems very questionable. Why not rely on the original SL vision, allow people to develop their second identities and build SL businesses that are truly derived from the platform’s opportunities. Phil Ember had found me a link about an SL clothing factory http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/at-sundance-a-second-life-sweatshop-is-art/ whics seems almost like a sweat shop, actual people slaving on a moving belt, creating IP for the company. Check it out, it’s pretty amazing!
Cheers
Quin
I added Christiana's original link. Thanks for finding it for me Loki!
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