Short video intvw: Rosedale on new CEO

http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/04/25/video-rosedale-discuses-new-ceo/

I found two interesting points in this:

1. Rosedale plans to spend a lot of his time on making the new resident experience easier, citing that as a major impediment to virtual world growth.

2. Rosedale believes that corporate presences ala IBM (i.e. private zones for collaboration, as opposed to ongrid brand reinforcement) will "dominate usage growth of Second Life" in the future. Personally, I agree that this "office park" model of SL in partnership with businesses is very powerful.

What do you think?
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In other words: we only care about new residents, the residents we already have can rot for all we care about them.

And, of course, making things better for new residents can only be at the expense of caring about existing residents because.....?

It's not about making the whole experience better for new residents; it's about getting new residents up to speed better so that they'll stick around longer.

I interpret that as just being one thing that they'll work on, and not the whole focus, so it's neither good nor bad for existing residents - imo..

Pretty much the focus he has had for awhile now.

Get more people in and work on getting corporations to buy into it. Not really anything new in the interview.

Taking Phillip Rosedale at his word I think he's on the right track for Linden Lab...........perhaps not for us residents though. If you make it easier for the new resident's life in SL the it, by extension, will make all residents life easier. Retention is the name of the game..............I stuck around despite the problems. Many more would stick around without those problems. Growth is not bad..........but it does entail changes. And some of those changes may not sit well with everyone........but that's the way life is.

Time will tell.

Don't forget, LL is trying to position itself against competition............we will probably have a choice if the direction is not to our liking.

There is a strong learning curve to become a regular user of SL for sure. I think simplifying that *could* help with some retention. The sad fact is that there is just not an economy set up to help new users find lindens in game to enjoy purchasing items, etc.

Camp chairs and striping/cyber for cash are the dominant ways to earn money. One nets you very little and the other is not for everyone.

If only there was a large job market in SL to take care of that. Likely not going to happen, I know.. but I do think that has a bit to do with retention too.

More new residents (that bother to actually stick around) leads to higher concurrency which leads to more "database gremlins" more frequently.

I'd have more faith if he had said: "we are really going to focus on making the platform more stable and avoid the daily disruptions that currently plague SL. After that we'll take steps to ensure that we can scale as the needs arises and then we'll focus on improving retention."

I doubt new residents have close to the same tolerance for grid failures/viewer crashes as we do, or are willing to put up with the annoyances that plague people day to day. It doesn't matter how easy orientation is if a newbie consistently gets "Asset server didn't respond in a timely fashion. Object returned to sim." when trying to grab the landmark to leave OI. They'll just give up if things aren't working on their first (few) tries.

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The basics of SL aren't all that difficult: use the arrow keys to move, type in the chat bar to chat and understanding that search-and-teleport is the equivalent of using google and clicking a hyperlink to get somewhere and landmarks work as "Favorites". That's really pretty much it.

All the rest is still useful and some of it is necessary if they wish to stick around, but explaining about the economy, freebies, appearance, etc can wait until they're used to the basics, or when the question or need is there.

Growth in the number of residents is a key economic incentive for retaining many existing residents. Unfortunately, the current grid just can't support any increased concurrency at all, so basically the system is at a kind of equilibrium where anybody who comes in and stays is almost guaranteed to displace another who just can't tolerate the pain anymore.

Now, if this were not the case--that is, if there were actually any capacity available to support grown--then it would actually be an interesting marketing problem to allocate resources among recruitment, retention on arrival, and longer term retention. (Wireless telecom carriers have long faced this problem. Coincidentally, at one time, spectrum and technology limitations capped growth for some carriers in some markets.)

But even if SL could grow, it's not clear that LL could have any useful data on which to base such decisions. So many intentionally disposable accounts are created that I don't see how one could know what a good retention rate would be for new accounts. And probably bots have the best retention rates of all; they have less trouble with that steep initial learning curve.

mainstream?!?!?!

The normal person expects uptime and perfect uptime when they play. something LL will never do.

Basically to get the REAL virtual world or metaverse LL needs a redesign. since that won't happen the next real competitor that comes along wins the game.

True.........but who will that be is the question

New residents mean new customers, how much stuff is really sold to oldbies nowdays in comparison?

If you look at other MMO's like WoW & COH, you can see that the userbase is quite happy to have the whole grid shut down for 4 hours every Thursday night, they expect it and work around it rather than complaining they can't be online .

But, Tegg, those people are not confused about what they are playing is a game. Quite a difference when so many think of this platform as something else. Time lost due to maintaince on a game is something people can plan for........time lost to someone wanting to make money can never be planned for.

Huge difference.

Of course it can, RL companies stop sales all the time due to external factors, if they know it's going to happen they just plan for it and work around it, heck it's not like the competion clothing makers in SL are making sales when everyone is locked out.

The day I hear SL as being used by Pittsburgh companies is the day SL has become usefull to corporations.

Last 2 companies I contracted with, SL was considered "a game for sex perverts" and not allowed on the company network.

Gotta love old fashioned conservative "Da Burgh".