Any corporate IT person who took Gartner's advice and looked into Home for more than five minutes would know they don't know what they're talking about. So while that analysis might make a business think twice about setting up shop in SL, if they're hell bent on getting involved in virtual worlds it's still the only viable game in town if they also want a large installed user base and content creation. Virtual worlds as a platform for commerce, training, and similar activities is still in its infancy. I doubt there will be a rock solid VR platform that can fulfill people's expectations and facilitate all the things people want to use them for reliably for another decade.
Yes, Home and almost all other virtual environments are severely lacking in online user content creation tools, directly accessible to all users.
They don't need these to be able to be a viable platform for corporations though. It's actually the preferred situation.
Currently we see much simpler architectures like There/IMVU/Kaneva take away a lot of the corporate business from SL. Not because they offer a better experience, but their simple platform allows for more stability.
Also, I we look at most large scale efforts in SL, we see the fact that the current builder-feature rich environment is actually more a problem than an advantage. ESC even decided to develop a simpler client to allow for a better experience for the CSI project.
In the alternative worlds, the custom content will primarily be developed by smaller groups of people having access to the supported content creation tools and permission to create these by the platform hosters. These will be dedicated project development companies (often including the host company itself), with a known track record in advertising/media/3d design etc.
For 'Home', this scenario would generally be ideal. First they introduce a platform for social purposes. Then they probably will open it up to content from their subsidiaries/customers, the game developer houses. (Companies with a huge track record in advertising/media/3d design etc.). Otherwise a platform like home would be useless.
As soon as this is common practice, the social 'Home' platform, combined with a strong set of backed 'game house' developer companies as 'content creators', can easily open this architecture to develop custom projects for 'non-game' corporations.
So in the end Walmart will go to EA's 'Home Project Development' subsidiary to build a training facility in Sony's Home (or more probable: Sony's Grid for Businesses) for them.
Where does it leave the users of SL? Well, they'll probably keep doing what they did for ages, build small scale businesses, create content, buy content and have fun socializing. It's simply a different ball game.
