Eye on the Blog: Philip’s “Update on Strategy, Call for an In-World Meeting”

In his latest blog post, Philip Linden talked about what Linden Lab was doing, and announced there would be an in-world meeting soon, before the end of the month.

Philip came out to say Linden Labs had quite a bit of work to do in making Second Life more appealing to most computer users, and admitted Linden Labs was working on projects that it should have waited for until other things were taken care of. The Lab, he stated, was calling it’s current direction “back to basics.”

“First on the list,” Philip stated, “should be a big attack on lag and crashes, clearly things that very negatively impact all users.” Second, Philip talked about “need to more rapidly improve and innovate Second Life. ... in the short term you can expect to see greatly shortened release cycles across all our systems and ... lots of community feedback as a first result of those efforts.” He also stated Second Life would be sticking with Viewer 2, hoping to “very rapidly make Viewer 2.x the best and most widely-used Second Life viewer.” The negative reaction many residents have to the new viewer was not addressed.

Also talked about was Second Life’s “virtual content” market economy, expecting it to be around a total of $600 million US dollars in 2010. He wanted to “redirect efforts to improve and grow that market as quickly as possible. Making content and experience creators more successful is what ultimately drives the growth of Second Life.” He stated he wanted to make it easier for residents to buy and use products in SL, but did not go into specifics in the post as to how Linden Labs would accomplish this.

Philip wanted to talk about these, and other issues, more openly with the residents, “Before the end of July, we will also hold an in-world gathering where we can talk more about these plans and take questions. More details about how we can best get a big group together and talking will be coming in another post.”

Philip went on to say that Linden Labs would not be focusing on a web-based client, Linden Lab was “not planning to change Second Life to exclude any categories of users.” He suggested the work on that idea was being “reduced,” to concentrate on “a single effective system that is better for all categories of user” before it could go back to “how to customize it for different markets.”

He closed his post by thanking the Second Life residents, “in particular those people who sent me the many heart-warming email messages of support that I've received since returning.” He asked that the emails continue, saying that the questions and issues brought up in them were helping to guide his policies, I can't say that I can read or respond to everything, but I have gotten great value from many of the well-written thoughts I've received.”

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