Linden Labs and the Lack of Strategic Focus

If Linden Labs has a strategic focus for it Second Life technology then it is the best kept secret since the Allied plans for D-Day. What are they trying to with Second Life? Where are they trying to go? How do they want people to think about this technology? Five years from now, what will have had to be accomplished in order to call it a success. They appear to be on operational cruise control, with a few tactical initatives, and no strategic direction. This would be like driving your car at a steady 55 mph, stopping periodically for maintenance, while having no idea where you might be going.

At the operational level they generate a snowstorm of statistics. They measure the number of accounts, the number of premium accounts, the amount of land sold, the number of dollars spent, and so forth. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell from these numbers if they are making progress or not. For a while they seemed to be motivated by the 'bigger is better' view and produced graphs showing their amazing growth. But, is this growth good? This is like giving away money and reporting each month on how much money you have given away. You can produce some dramatic growth statistics. But are you getting any where that you want to get? Since they do not seem to know who their customers are, for example, (a topic to be taken up in a future post), they cannot tell if the growth in basic accounts is positive growth or a growing burden.

At the tactical level they have shown a few promising initiatves such as voice chat and open sourcing. But, again, without a strategic direction, these initiative cannot be seen as good or bad. For example, if Second Life is supposed to be a stage upon which people explore their fantacies and self expression, then voice chat is not a good idea as it interfers with the anonymity of the person at the keyboard. If, on the other hand, Second Life is seen as a vehicle for distance education then voice chat is the greatest thing since sliced bread. People have strong feelings about issues like voice chat in Second Life reflecting the lack of cohesion in the strategic focus.

So, what is Second Life supposed to be? A chat room? A social interaction technology? A technological extension of the imagination? The 3D Web? A platform for education and business applications? Who knows? And until somebody figures out some answers to these questions, it is not going any where.