Will Mark Kingdon's Reign Boost Second Life?

News Type: Event — Seeded on Sat Jul 19, 2008 2:01 PM EDT

Article Source: GigaOM

technology, google, second-life, linden-lab, lively, mark-kingdon, open-sim, user-created-virtual-worlds

Back in April, ex-Organic CEO Mark Kingdon took the helm of Linden Lab, replacing its charismatic founder, Philip Rosedale, at a time when the company was already struggling in an increasingly competitive market. While Linden claims to be profitable, its market share has plateaued, with scalability and usability woes keeping the number of monthly active users around 550,000 since last summer.

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{"commentId":2231107,"authorDomain":"marilynl"}

Marilyn L

From the article:

"Anytime Google enters a new market," Kingdon told me, "people's reaction is 'Oh look! Google's there; they'll win.'" But he doesn't even see the search giant as a direct competitor. "I think the thing that most people looking from the outside don't realize is how diverse the use cases [of content in Second Life] are," he said, citing everything from art exhibits to a company's shareholder meeting to a new educational initiative. By comparison Lively, Kingdon said, "…has I guess you could say almost a single-use case, graphical chat."

{"commentId":2231107,"threadId":"315925","contentId":"1679292","authorDomain":"marilynl"}

1 vote

#1 - Sat Jul 19, 2008 2:02 PM EDT

{"commentId":2231157,"authorDomain":"Brad-Leclerc"}

Brad Leclerc

Frankly, change in the SL management can only be a good thing at this point. They've gotten far to complacent and lazy about making progress. There hasn't been a serious set of bug fixes or improvements in months and months, and almost nothing has been done about scalability in a couple of years.

Hopefully this will get things moving again, because SL COULD be awesome...but it needs serious work before it's even usable in the eyes of most of it's target user base.

{"commentId":2231157,"threadId":"315925","contentId":"1679292","authorDomain":"Brad-Leclerc"}

1 vote

#2 - Sat Jul 19, 2008 2:11 PM EDT

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MARILYN L

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Will Mark Kingdon's Reign Boost Second Life?

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