Article: "A Second Chance for a 3-D Virtual Reality?"

Come here and read the trim sort of article, and I suppose, discuss! Has sort of a nostalgic slant with brief touches on points that've heated up the forums recently.

http://www.clickz.com/experts/ad/ad_tech/article.php/3530361

(Yes, there is a "Linden Labs" plural in there.)

hugs from mummy

Eric Picard is a senior product planner in Microsoft's MSN Monetization and Ad Planning group

Awesome find Tor!

I read with great interest, and think his assessment is about as right on as any I have read to date.

Yes, Eric is already drooling at the thought of Microsoft in the Metaverse. That really should scare the hell out of anyone who thinks SL is something other than a game... and ironically, though Eric himself believes 'it's not a game', Microsoft (and through them, Eric), I assure you, treat and market to it as if it is... you see, when LL says 'it's not a game', they're wishing. When Microsoft says 'it's not a game', it just means they have you in their sights... and not necessarily in a good way.

Train Wreck coming in oh..... about 1.5 years. Get your rubberneck ready. (sad smile)

"What does this mean to marketers? In the Metaverse of "Snow Crash," corporations quickly realized they could use the unique opportunity offered there for marketing and advertising. Huge swaths of Stephensen's Metaverse were gobbled up by corporations that built all kinds of stuff and which capitalized on the opportunity to interact with the virtual community in new ways. I predict we're close to that right now."

This still begs the question of why a corporation would invest money to advertise inworld when they already hit residents with RL campaigns that are already tapping their bottom lines and advertising to millions of others at the same time.

SL would have to be poised to replace the standard browser, chat clients and mail programs to contain enough market share for most companies to even consider spending resources to develop inworld advertisement techniques and campaigns. The world would have to be what people meant when they said "Internet" the same way they mean WWW when they say "Internet" now. I mean MS would have to develop a truly functional version of the world and integrate it into Windows.

Oh, I see what you mean. Well, yeah, this is kind of like a leak eh? Next MS'll be publishing that they didn't really want to talk about this yet but, since the cat's out of the bag, we're actually already in early beta stages with a few large firms...DirectX...bugs but a fully integrated developer kit will be released in early 2006...

Surely that depends on whether a *killer app* is developed that uses SL's strengths to produce something unachievable in other media. I'm talking more innovative, more useful, more targeted and more cost effective. I can think of several already...

I agree with you. Why would Microsoft (not fait accompli, at this point) spend additonal capital developing just marketing and advertising when the majority of the SL population is uber-tech-savvy? It does not make too much sense to me.

Now, if Microsoft wanted to use SL as a mini R&D lab or if they wanted to take advantage of the amazing concentration of intellect and creativity, investment in SL makes some sense.

I have met some folks in SL--many of whom I would, without hesitation, call 'brilliant.' If we insist that SL is a 'game' and not a 'platform' (I know, I know--I am going somewhere with this ), then is it not in keeping with a corporation like Microsoft's corporate culture to want to harness SL's intellectual potential?

Microsoft, at one point, created an ethos of child-like play. It was a 'campus' in Redmond. Images of Microsoft employees jetting around the 'campus' on scooters or taking time off to shoot pool made the notion of 'work-play' very attractive; however, Microsoft was also extracting 60+ hour work weeks from its workers.

I may be waaaayyyy off base, but I think it might deserve some consideration.

It seems that Phillip Linden agrees with me

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People always point at Snowcrash and weep helplessly over the idea of a virtual economy. What they ALWAYS forget is that The Great Simolean Caper prequels it, and explains quite plainly that a real economy needs something hard to back it, read: gold. Lindens are no more "an entire economy" than Pokemon cards are.

Does that mean the US economy is not a real economy?

Did not the US abandon the Gold Standard in 1933?

-Ghoti

LoL!

Gold coins are waaaayyyy kool!!

Like Philip said - you're right Jarod.

So then why all the hullabaloo over GOM if L$ are like Pokemon cards?

Because the Lindens are great at selling snake oil.

But it started out with gold backing it. It may have abandoned it, but to get started it had gold.

That may be true, but then you aren't one of the folks that are upset over the issue, at least to my knowledge.

The "economy" issue only upsets me because it tends to disrupt and interfere with the "technology" issue. The in-world Linden transaction thing -- what I know about it -- bothers me because, had Linden Lab not decided that the Internet was SL-centric, they'd have just built an economic API. Then we would have been able to plug SL directly into things like GOM, IGE, Paypal, Ebay, etc. Essentially, to follow my Pokemon card analogy, SL has decided that instead of becoming a cog in the burgeoning E-commerce world, it wants to be a comic book shop, hoarding its own valuable within the esoteric confines of itself.

I agree with this, it has long been an ever increasing issue in my mind. This is to say that I have watched for going on 3 years now the ever growing focus on money. This is not to say I am anti-capitalist or anti-commercial, I just think a balance is necessary, or you will see what we see now with the multiple, daily, contentious threads about money.I agree again. The only problem I can see with it is the possible backlash from folks who want zero commercialism in SLWhile I hear the point you are making, I do not think that LL would intentionally (consciously) position themselves in this manner, because it's a recipe for failure. So if this is indeed true, I would attribute it to oversights on their part. I have always subscribed to a wait and see position, perhaps I am being a bit too complacent.

Those people have lost. They are the same people that were complaining about our automobile-centric culture well after the Model T was running off the production line for several years.

LF

Yes, which is why I have them on ignore.

This old geek thinks:
"Wow, I picked HTML to revolutionize this Inter Net."
Then he thinks:
"Whoops, I picked VRML to rev the net"
Then he thinks:
"Whoops, Flash is just used for resource sucking ads instead of..."
Then he thinks:
"Hmmm, the verdict is still out on extensible Markup Languages. But after VRML...."
Now he thinks:
"SL is a great place to go for virtual wet t-shirt contests and to buy clothes that I can't fit into at home!"

MSL

But seriously, the plans for MS concerning XBox360 (a much more logical choice for this kind of technology/concept), and monetizing on user content/virtual content have been clear since the MS demos at E3 this year (velocitygirl).

The path taken by MS differs slightly from SL, which first allowed for a all around 3d virtual environment and 'pegged' the creation/economy on that. MS will use the current established gaming market to piggyback on, slowly integrating content creation/monetizing within the XBox and PC platform. This will also be done by Sony (linked to Station.com) and probably several other companies.

The playing ground concerning virtual economies/monetizing of virtual assets will change rapidly in the coming years, now the 'big boys' are getting their feet wet.

That's an incomplete view of it.

The US dollar DOES have something backing it right now - the United States government's acceptance of it to pay debts owed to that government. Nobody else has to take dollars; they can insist on credit cards or barter or giant stone coins if they want them.

Gold itself is not particularly worth much as a metal, at least not until the modern age of computing (since it makes such a good conductor). The only difference between it and a soft dollar, really, is you can't print off more gold.

Jeff Allard is the one from Microsoft to be worried about. He's the guy who in the early '90s said, "Hey, lets get in the video game market" and they did. And the guy who said, "Hey, lets take over the browser market." and they did. And now he's talking metaverse.

I bet Philip could drink him under the table and is better looking, too! Its going to be fun to watch.



-Flip

Dear MMOG Developers,

Neal Stephenson wrote Snowcrash based on the Internet he knew at the time: BBS's, The Well, AOL, etc. Please stop designing your 3D worlds based on technology from 1990.

Hate-filled and bile-spewing,
Jarod Godel