Real Life will Trump Second Life, Microsoft Says

Make that MSDOS........DOS was around a long time before Bill Gates/Steve Jobs.

QDOS or 86-DOS if you want to get technical about it

Now that we got that straight..............LOL.

Whatever happens with "RL" and it maybe trumping "SL" only time will show us which way it will all shake out. Microsoft is a formidable competitor........and despite some failures, they have much more success than anyone else in the field. I'll say it again........."Don't poo poo Microsoft entering the virtual realm of the internet". A lot of people have issues with MS.......heck so do I (I spent good money for Millineum Edition and it was a total waste). If Microsoft developes this niche in a virtual internet they will be hard to beat. Linden Lab and anyone else should know that.......if they don't then they are in for a hard and expensive battle and they may very well loose.

I still say the two (or more, depending on how many other ideas crop up) will come up with some standard to make both visions viable. Otherwise, MS will get the businesses LL wants and SL will be mostly religated to a sophicated game. The artists and creators will go with LL........the big money (business) will go with MS.

Or it all could just fall apart as some great idea and something entirely different will develop.

This is right. It's not either or.

The hard part will be for SL to incorporate new tools into it's existing structure and tools.

For a short period, Microsoft owned Softimage--then they sold it to Avid. Microsoft can buy things after it's been developed and I think they will continue to look at mainstream use rather then smaller niche use, so they might be right there. If something bursts into mainstream then they might go for it. In the meantime they will keep their eyes on things.

If Microsoft makes a virtual representation of my home, I'll tell them to get their ads off mah lawn!

Semi-serious, too...

Except Yahoo! lol.

bet yahoo wished they'd taken that deal now.

Oh I wouldn't poo poo Microsoft, I just think there's more to this than saying "Hey we're Microsoft". Personally I think the future will have room for worlds like Second Life and the Microsoft vision. Generally in computing we should expect the unexpected, Xerox got into a flap about the paperless office how many years ago?



Millenium Edition was a heinous pile of pants that should never have seen the light of day.

But, but, they PAID more for that silly logo and a sense of belonging to the lemming herd! Got given an iPod, broke it by accident, bought a Creative Zen, do NOT miss the EgoPod in the least!

At some point even before that, I believe in the late 40's, some IBM chairman was even quoted saying there would probably be a market for 5 computers worldwide. Of course, that was the time that a computer didn't even fit in a highschool training hall.

Hi, Lindal's Resident Geek here. Yes, you're right. We won't go into the history of why that's so...except to say that it's NOT because Microsoft is "so far ahead of everyone else in software development".

MS was actually last to the table with a graphic user interface operating system...Windows was a patch on top of DOS that poorly mimicked Apple's MacOS.

They were late to the game with an internet browser, and Internet Explorer only got the huge market share it did by virtue of being nearly inseparably entwined in the Windows OS.

They didn't have antivirus protection or firewalls or, in fact, any security features in Windows until others had already identified the market and had thriving products for sale.

They were late to the game with Windows Media Player...Apple beat them out with QuickTime.

And so on.

What Microsoft has going for it is two things: size, and money. They have an enormous user base. Anything they put out, even if it is clunky and full of bugs, is going to find buyers. And they have enough money to buy up really promising technologies and incorporate them into their software.

It seems to me I saw some sort of preview of PhotoSynth a couple of years ago. I'm surprised that it hasn't progressed farther in all that time...or maybe it's no surprise. I'll bet that it is an ENORMOUS resource hog. A vision of "the real world inside a machine" will remain a vision for quite a while, I'm afraid...there are just too many bytes required to model reality in any significant way.

fun site to read about computer history and see pictures of all your old computers...

http://www.old-computers.com/history/timeline.asp

A virtual world that completely mimics the real world? Um...why? Already got the real world for that

SL and other "free-form"/user-created virtual worlds are interesting because, while you can get a load of crap, you also get a ton of great, imaginative and unique stuff that people have built!

But a lot of people DO want that, some are trying to make SL exactly that.

A well known quote, but there is no evidence it was ever made - it was supposedly made in 1943 by THE IBM CEO Thomas Watson. It took a ton of technological advances to make it an untruth, but the closest to an attributable statement is by some mathematician, who was even more pessimistic, saying the world only needed 3.

Its all good. We'll wake up someday and find out it is just one big computer running across the Internet and they'll be right, regardless who said it. Virtual worlds at that point will be called 'Real Life' and the rest is just 'out there'.

Not that the above is exactly an original idea - my computer has been running on and on about it for years...