Virtual Worlds Forum

GigaOm has an interview with Mark Kingdon who replaced Philip Rosedale as Linden Labs CEO last April. Linden Labs and Second Life aren’t in great shape: growth, certainly in paid users, has stalled, and they are facing new competition every day which threatens to out-innovate them. The greater popularity of virtual worlds and MMOs such as World of Warcraft and Habbo Hotel, and the high-profile failure of many brand experiments in Second Life, might lead one to suggest that Second Life isn’t nearly as relevant as it once was.

Kingdom, though, is very bullish about Linden’s future. He’s disdainful towards Google’s Lively which was launched this month, comparing the vast number of consumer and enterprise use cases of his product to what he sees as Lively’s single use case: visual chat. He’s right at the moment – Lively doesn’t amount to much at launch – but Google has consistently demonstrated in the past that it can enter a space late and beat the incumbents through fast, enlightened iteration.

Refreshingly, he is aware that Second Life’s UI is far from ideal at present (potentially a key area on which Google could beat the incumbent virtual world, I would have thought). The ‘first hour’ experience of the product is irritating and counter-intuitive, and he states “We’re also working very hard to make Second Life intuitively, and maybe even delightfully, usable”.

Kingdon also confirms that an IPO isn’t in the short-term plan, which makes a lot of sense. Second Life, having been ridiculously over-hyped, is now suffering hangover from that, with many writing it off as irrelevant. They may be right, or they may be wrong, but with industry confidence in the archetypal 3D world at a low, Linden is absolutely right to postpone going public. If, in the short to medium term, they can restart growth of both user numbers and revenue (which whilst not public can be assumed not to be growing very fast, if at all, at the moment), and in the long term successfully establish themselves as the ‘glue’ between interoperable virtual worlds making money providing value added services, then they will be in a far better position than they are today. That’s a big if, though.