CTO Cory Linden Leaving Linden Labs

*Someone* at LL isn't happy with SL as strictly an entertainment product but wants to see it as much more than that and since Philip has the last say in everything, I don't think it's the "let's fix what we have and worry about the dream later" camp that won.

So what should come next? Taking a look at the last few years, we’ve gotten many of the critical features working and scaled the world just enough for people to believe. We have managed to create the first really viable virtual world, but how can we be relevant in the future? Our goal initially was to quickly make things work… for example avatar animation, a scripting language, buying land, or voice. But now we seem to have reached a point where the rapid addition of capabilities is no longer the key challenge, and indeed can be counterproductive. So we sat down and thought about this together, and concluded that the first mission statement was complete, and that we needed both another mission statement and probably a different way of doing things. That change came at about the same time I stood up at the SLCC conference wearing a “Missing Image” T-shirt (sadly I’m sure most of you get the joke) and talked about how all too often Linden Lab is now simply ‘in the way’. In the way of you creating your Second Life, or having a collaborative meeting, or keeping your virtual business running. I promised that we were listening, and that we would change from being a ‘lab’ trying to bring SL to life into a company that keeps SL growing and scaling until everyone in the world is online. See how that all goes together?

Looking back at the last year or so we’ve seen lots of challenges, and I think, though they’ve been hard, we’ve been able to weather them: Second Life has grown enormously faster than our systems have been able to support, we collected European VAT charges in a clumsy way, we restricted different types of activities to comply with the law and our own principles, and we suffered through far too much downtime and instability. But we’ve also started to change in the way I had promised in September. Our downtimes have been lower for September and October than during the summer, we have done a better job communicating and handling the release process, we’ve identified and fixed some sources of content loss, and have a solid plan and work underway for substantially reducing both client and server crashing in Q4 and Q1. It may sometimes seem like we are not listening, but I can tell you that we are. We are changing, for the better, and I think, for a company of almost 250 people, we are doing it faster than expected.

Looking ahead, some thoughts. As I mentioned above, our weakest link is now clearly crashing (both client and server), and we are going to very substantially reduce it over the next two quarters. Our update to our physics engine, which is now in beta testing, is one visible example and will hopefully greatly decrease server crashing. Stability is what we’ve got to be all about in the first half of 2008, at the cost of other work.

That is not what I am reading in Phillip Rosedale's speach regarding the new mission statement which he gave on Nov. 21, 2007, only what 3 weeks ago. It sounds to me like he is saying we need to fix it or we won't have a dream later.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/11/21/long-road-behind-long-road-ahead/

I think that Cory was asked to resign (ie let go) because Coke went to There. Coke had a virtual world, arrived here first and spent a year here. Had SL been stable enough, their world moved here.

So much speculation in this thread. Who knows how or if this will change SL's direction? My guess would be, not much. The only thing any of us actually know is that none of us actually know. As Geirge Carlin would say, could be meat, could be cake.

To whoever the new CTO is going to be I just have this to say: Give us additional avatar texture layers before I have a tantrum! kthx.

Or to quote Eddie Izzard....Cake...or Death?

Quite frankly, Coke doesn't belong here. Coke belongs in a place with a younger demographic, more "family-friendly" content and a more controlled environment. I'm actually impressed that their (Coke) marketing team saw this and made the correct choice for their brand.

Brenda, what did you do with Cory! Pretty suspicious that all this happened during your week "away".

Did you go to LL to straighten things out?

A group where it will take longer to develop diabetes and/or obesity from drinking this dreadful stuff.

To whoever the new CTO is going to be I just have this to say: Give us additional avatar texture layers before I have a tantrum! kthx.

Does this put you in the "we want SL to move forward with new features" camp or the "stop adding bling and fix what we've got" camp?

/me guesses the answer is somewhere in between but I don't see many people say that. It's usually one pole or the other..

I'm definitely in the "keep advancing the platform" camp. There are some serious walls that we've been banging our heads against for years now that really need to be addressed. They definitely need to keep hammering away at stability, but I'd hate to see that get all the attention.

Define "better offer"
Define "better work"

They are both matters of opinion. There is no absolute "better".
It's up to management to convince people that what they offer overall is "better".

There's little point in people in people "working hard", if someone is not ensuring that they are also working clever.

Somebody no doubt worked very hard on all the recent updates.
However, because nobody appeared to be checking that they work clever, we get a whole bunch of rebroken stuff.


People ask - "WTF?? Why didn't they test this stuff???"
Very simple answer. If you test stuff, you have to tell someone that their creation is broken, and sometimes very stupidly broken. In an organisation driven by a Love Machine, that's a very dangerous thing to do.

Stability should get nearly all the attention and if that means hiring more people, that should happen. The platform needs stability above all else.

The UI needs attention, that has been moving slowly. The UI development will help the platform. Being able to change and edit the UI, use your own skins yadda yadda yadda.

LL need to start putting customers first, not their own devs.

Stability should get nearly all the attention and if that means hiring more people, that should happen. The platform needs stability above all else.

The UI needs attention, that has been moving slowly. The UI development will help the platform. Being able to change and edit the UI, use your own skins yadda yadda yadda.

LL need to start putting customers first, not their own devs.

...The problem that I've been seeing for over a year is a lack of clear engineering leadership. Cory's brilliant, but he's no CTO. There needs to be a strong, world class CTO who can put the brakes on all of the wild feature work and make sure that the foundation is there for people to trust that SL will be around....

Personally, I'm hoping that instead of getting a shiny new CTO, LL gets a VP engineering. Someone who can really incentivise, protect and drive their developers in a professional manner. Someone young enough to 'get' open source, and old enough to stand up to Philip Rosedale. ...

..... I'm hoping Philip will know enough to hire from outside, rather than promote one of the existing team: I'm pretty sure about half of Engineering thinks they must be next-in-line, so will surely leave if somebody else from the ranks is selected. .....

I agree. Removing the L$ to USD means that many content creators would be leaving and with just reason. Why on earth would LL want us to pay them in L$ if it's not worth USD to the users? .