New Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon is still making irregular postings to the official Second Life blog. It's all heady and exciting stuff, to be sure. Growth, focus on improvement of the new user experience, simplified registration, and so on.
Yet something seems to be missing. What's missing is anything that excites you if you're already a Second Life user. There's plenty here to entice those who aren't already users, but if you're already one, there doesn't seem to be anything much in them for you to get excited about. Put together with some other pieces, however, it certainly creates an interesting picture about future direction for Second Life.
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There's the navigation update to the viewer in the works, but that initiative pretty much predates Kingdon's tenure within the company (it started on 17 April), as do the stability improvements and infrastructure work that are bringing in more users. Still, as the front-man for the Lab right now, we can't begrudge Kingdon as focus for the credit for this work.
(We're a bit more dubious about the usefulness of the navigation update in a Second Life context, given the prototypes and designs, but that's another story)
Kingdon also mentioned the new Chief Product Officer, Tom Hale, whom we wrote about previously. Hale's very interesting, given his speciality and prior associations.
You see, Hale was heavily involved with Acrobat Connect (and formerly Macromedia Breeze). Essentially, Hale is a specialist in teleconferencing/remote meeting products for departments and enterprises. The teleconferencing market has a considerable hole in it left by fractured and disjointed teleconferencing product strategies at Microsoft. That's a gap that's ripe for filling with an enterprise teleconferencing product.
The only problem is that Linden Lab doesn't have an enterprise teleconferencing product.
Oh, wait. Now they do -- only it isn't actually entirely their own product. They have an exclusive license to market and sell the Rivers Run Red Immersive Workspaces product.
When you look at the hiring of Tom Hale, the ongoing hiring of enterprise sales and marketing staff, and the licensing of the Immersive Workspaces product from Rivers Run Red, this all seems to signal a clear direction for where Linden Lab is taking Second Life. Clearer than anything else we've seen in a year, certainly.
