A lot of parallels to another industry?

Well, I hope you are not comparing Linden Lab to Microsoft. They are on completely opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to business acumen and leadership. If 3-D is a wave of the future, Linden Lab isn't going to be creating the wave, or riding the wave, and no one will remember them when it takes off.

If you were suggesting that some of the residents working in Second Life might be developing the next best thing, Second Life just simply isn't a good enough platform for it. One isn't going to create great sculptures with a butter knife.

A lot of businesses do make extensive use of 3-D applications, and World of Warcraft brought the MMORPG game to the mainstream. If something like Second Life is going to be part of the future, it isn't going to be Second Life (unless someone competent buys it, for what is left of the name goodwill alone, and completely re-builds it); someone with vision and a some investment capital to plop down is going to do it.

(Do we want the next Microsoft anyway? Microsoft gained domination of the operating system market, despite an awful OS that was inferior to every competitor technically, though a combination of non-competitive business practices and what is just truly an awesome marketing campaign.)

What waiting for Gary Kildall to fly his plane and his wife not sign the right deal with IBM

Fair point Desmond, the IT world has been filled with opportunists, some of them accidental opportunists. The 3D world will deliver at some point, but who takes advantage is still far from clear.

If Linden Lab turns out to be Digital Research, that would at least mean that there *was* a Microsoft in the market.

Unfortunately the competition seems to be trying to be the next Texas Instruments.

(TI made a personal computer that was locked down tighter than the iPhone, and despite being the first 16-bit home computer completely vanished as a result)

Why stop at Texas Instruments, we had Commodore with the pet and Vic-20, in the UK we had Sinclair with the ZX81 and spectrum, we're at that stage now with these virtual worlds but if LL are to defy history and go beyond being pioneers they need to keep their wits about them.

We don't have any of them in this situation. Seriously. As closed and limited as Second Life is, it's ten times as open as anyone else. There is no Commodore and Atari and Apple and Radio Shack.

Gosh. All you guys must be so OLD! When I was at school, I remember making holes in an oily strip of paper with a sort of typewriter thingy, taking it to the local technical college on the bus to present it to a huge behemoth from the Metropolis film, and coming home with a sheet of error messages printed in hexadecimal. Now that machine could THINK!

I was thinking of Linden Research as more in the role of Byte itself, and all of us amateurs running around "doing stuff" as the people in the pages. There are tons of legacy protocols and quirks from the early electronic age still around, but actual hardware... not much is left in the consumer world. Mil or aerospace, or even industry, yeah... but none for the rest of us.

The whacky analogy I was making was this: maybe some SL dressmaker out there is gonna "go real" and start designing, from a start here... or some animations maker is going to be the next "big provider" and get mega rich once the masses roll in, a household name... or maybe some third party viewer maker will be the next Netscape or Microsoft.

My kids already buy "apps" for their Apple devices, and when I was that age, there weren't any "apps." It's all new. Will there be a good number of real multimillionaire "app" makers for the 3D grid, just as people sell Word and Excel and gaming software someday?

...politely gestures toward the Caledon Library system with its many branches, and its master genius, Sir JJ Drinkwater You'll find a branch at Oxbridge, of course.

LOL.. I remember, quite well, my first experience with computers.. Riding my bike, one fine summer day, to my dads work and having him fix me up with a game of lunar lander, loaded from paper-tape by some engineer, because he was running late.

At the risk of sounding like a chronic whiner, it's hard to make serious stuff with SL because LL hasn't enabled it. The product is flakey and we frequently seem to realize that quicker than they do. They make huge, ginormous pricing changes every couple years instead of more frequent tweaks. As a development platform, it's quite stagnant compared to the rest of the world. That and they seem to have no problem about pissing off their customers.

/me predicts the next big business in SL will either be the secret project I've been working on lately or something that ties RL business into SL - something that removes (or at least blurs) that line between going to Dell Island (or whatever) and actually having a Dell show up at your RL doorstep. Either way, I don't see it getting easier for the little guy to make big progress via SL. That is, of course, if SL survives, which is not a given - they need to get waaaay less comfortable with their current monopoly.

Indeed. I owe a great deal to the expertise and the generosity of said gentleman.

Oh? You've discovered JJ? What a small grid it truly is, sometimes...


One of my young memories is that of a Rockwell impact printer "going off" at Autonetics ~ I was maybe 3 years old at the time. They had these really high speed, humongous typewriter printers that would print on wide paper rolls. The room would go from the normal humming sounds, to a sort of "many machine guns firing at once" sound for several seconds, and then abruptly stop. Scared me bad every time it printed something.

I used to have some of the punch cards used with that computer, that my dad gave me. Rockwell Autonetics was in the missile design business at that point, and they used the computer for various calculations.

That was maybe 1967 or 1968. 40 years ago. Ironically, the outside of the Autonetics buildings look pretty much exactly as they did in 1967, save that the trees are bigger and they are vacant (Boeing pretty much cleared out of there last year).

Imagine where we'll be in another 20 or 30 years. Looking back from that distant future... what would you wish you got involved with back in 2009?

I know someone who uses SL as a way of generating graphics for her RL clothing design.
Her 'materials' cost L$10 a pop.
Her glamorous models don't demand payment, and don't get dramatic.
She can do photo-shoots in exotic locations for free.

..... and don't tell me that RL fashion graphics don't look 'cartoonish'.
She can try/show all sorts of looks without the costs and manufacturing time of RL.

That would be difficult, because RL is so different. In SL, there is no gravity and no serious gusts of wind, no wear and tear, no chafing or physical discomfort or hang-and-fit requirements, nor any requirement for plausible physical-motion donnability and doffability. There is also no cost of materials or manufacturing logistics, no lead times for manufacturing or cost of inventory, no government regulation or consumer protection legislation. Renting studio space in RL and putting on fashion shows to get noticed is also more expensive by orders of magnitude, and you are far more likely to have to deal with middlemen and retailers rather than having your own store.

Being a clothing designer in SL might inspire someone to become a designer in RL as a future career, but it wouldn't provide the training and experience or actually be a steppingstone in that direction. It's no different than, say, building model airplanes and RC planes might inspire someone to pursue a career in later life as an aeronautical engineer, but would not provide any prerequisites for actually doing so... you'd need a real university education instead.