I had a chance to interview Philip Rosedale earlier this month, leading to a broad set of posts by bloggers who follow virtual worlds (and Second Life) pretty closely. You can see the whole thing here (with links to the analysis by Christian Renaud, Nic Mitham, Wagner James Au, Ben Duranske, Bettina Tizzy, Roland Legrand, and Dusan Writer), but after the break I include some of the more interesting quotes.
We are going to be talking about it today at noon pacific time. You can watch online, and participate in backchat, without going into Second Life, here.
On Hiring a "New Me" (Mark Kingdon) as CEO, to become Chairman
I’m a builder of things. And so I think the good call that I made primarily, with the board’s support, was to hire a ‘new me’ last year because I just felt that I’d be of more use to the company if I had the majority of my time working on design, product, innovation, problem solving, at the edge of where we’ve got challenges like usability, interface, those things. I wasn’t getting any more time. I mean with the company being 300 people – if you look back six months ago at my calendar – I wasn’t able to spend any time on design. I was spending all my time on leadership management, growing the company, organizational process.
On the Future of Virtual Worlds
I think where the industry is going in the next few years is a gradual broadening of the capabilities and the use cases of virtual worlds, to support a lot of different stuff that people are doing in the virtual worlds. I do believe, as I said today, that it’s difficult for me to see why it won’t be the case in a few years’ time that virtual worlds are not used for a very broad set of utilities and use cases and that that will bring them into a place of probably dominant use in the computing environment, meaning that more network traffic and more computers are basically deployed to enter and interact in virtual worlds than we are, for example, using them for the web today.
On Virtual Worlds for Grandma
If you had a grandparent or parent that was intelligent and interested in engaging with a new community, getting an extra job, finding something interesting to do in their older years, and they really weren’t that familiar with the internet at all, would you … teach them how to use Second Life, or would you teach them how to more generally just use the web?
Looks like Rosedale is effectively a builder of technology, but that doesn't automatically translate in good business sense.
Second Life for my grandma ?
He should refrain from automated Mission Generators and marketspeak.
Not only he sounds out of touch ("if you had an intelligent grandparent or parent" comes across as something that is beneath his brilliance)
he also doesn't make a compelling case for good business.
Where's the benefit ? How do we profit ? If there's no profit, where's the intrinsic value ?
How does it translate into a better life/experience/tool ?
Blank. No answers.
You should use it because it's cool and because Rosedale is oh so clever.
My grandma could care less about engrossing Rosedale's fortune.
No matter how much face-saving he got, now you see why he's not the CEO anymore.
Posted by: vruz | Sep 29, 2008 at 14:46