I won’t play arm-chair therapist to Philip Rosedale, but a series of posts on his recent interview with Reuters from Davos dissect his remark that he was “sad” about the crackdowns and restrictions of 2007. (That’s me in the front row looking attentive).
Fleep kicked it off with coverage at his blog, to which Aldon Hynes responded that:
People have commented to me about Linden Lab’s method of dealing with conflict as ‘passive aggressive’. …Yes, I feel sad too. I feel sad for Philip failing to demonstrate any leadership. I feel sad for people who want to make Second Life a more vibrant environment and keep bumping up against arbitrary and capricious restrictions by Linden Lab that are never sufficiently explained. Yet unless the folks at Linden Lab change their tune, the folks that I won’t be sad for are those people gearing up to provide alternative grids where the residents are actually valued and listened to.
Fleep’s reply was that Linden got caught up in their own success in 2007:
We’ll see what happens moving forward, and I could certainly be wrong, but what I’m hearing in Philip’s (and to some extent Mitch Kapor’s) remarks isn’t passive aggressive, incapable, ducking the responsibility b.s. I heard someone reflecting on a difficult year and acknowledging that it was difficult in spite of the “Philip is ’sad’” remarks it was sure to generate, and that’s the sort of thing that can go some distance in earning _my_ loyalty. It doesn’t go as far as filing a support ticket and getting a quick, accurate response, though, and the proof will be in the pudding.
I tend to agree with Fleep. That was the tone I heard as well, and I think Philip was sincere. But what I actually pictured wasn’t Linden getting caught up in its own success, but Linden being advised to hire better lawyers. Lawyers advise on law, and that advice needs to be taken in the context of business strategy and decisions made that evaluate the legal risks and the effect on strategy.
I believe that Philip, under the pressure of success was advised (or decided himself) “not to screw up a good thing”. Visions of CSI New York swarms headed SL’s way, the press coverage, and the knowledge that all would come to naught with another child AV scandal showing up on 20 Minutes, the Feds coming for a visit over illegal (in the US) casinos …. well, I suppose if I were Philip I’d consider those as possible deal breakers if the coming deluge of new users and all that positive buzz seemed to paint a picture of SL as headed to, well, AOL or Netscape land – IPO or Time Warner buy-out here we come! Oh, but better clean up those scam banks first.
He misjudged the risk however, or he judged it well and decided to take it all on the chin at once. Sad because the libertarian dream of SL was the foundation on which to attract the early creative class and just enough of the gambling/con artist/sex crowd to attract those early adopters (hey, isn’t that how the Net started?), but time to move on and act like grown ups. Besides, with open source servers around the corner, it won’t be long before SL is hosted from, say, Russia. Already, the banks and casinos have decamped for OpenLife Grid (and this is a GOOD thing for OLG??), and Philip can take solace from the idea that all things will eventually be possible on his platform once again – just keep it off shore.
But while I agree that client service can be improved (in my experience over the past several months, the service has been stellar, nearly immediate, and definitely an improvement from a short time ago, but I realize I’m a limited sample size), user retention improved, and so on, I echo a deeper sentiment which is that I still haven’t heard a coherent strategy from the Lindens beyond mechanics and technology.
We can talk all we want about user retention through the vibrant content that is SL, but Rosedale’s given no indication of a deeper content attraction strategy nor how content on the SL platform will compete. We can talk all we want about user retention and strategies for orientation, but that should be coupled with a strategy that looks at market segments and both advertises to them and supports them. We can talk about HTML on a prim, which is wonderful and the schedule is aggressive for achieving it, but what about strategies for aggregating content with other platform providers? Cell phone services? Web properties? Crossover opportunities with live venue spaces?
For Linden strategy seems to be all about the platform itself. Leadership requires good strategy, which is an articulation of a value proposition against a vision for how competitors might overlap with that proposition, and how customers will respond to it. Linden’s strategy is: “we’ll build it, maintain it, open it up, add some new bells and whistles, and open up the architecture, but what you do with it then is up to you”.
Your World, Your Imagination, indeed…the only problem is that in a world in which attention spans are limited, customers need to know “for what result”.
Philip described himself as an evangelist for Second Life. He may not be sad, evangelists rarely are, but he sounds a little hollow.
