You might want to tell that to Sun Microsystems and many other businesses who use Second Life for training, meetings, and morale-building across international boundaries. They'd be surprised to hear they gain zero benefit from using SL.

Nope. Many companies use SL to conduct virtual meetings, display presentations in a virtual environment without flying out all of their executives, and even do things like floor plans and conduct exercises.

One of my personal favorite examples is Wal-Mart and their use of virtual space to set up their floor plans for their stores. This way they can set it up, walk around it virtually, see if it works, and learn from their planning. If it doesn't look right or work the way they want it to, they can easy scratch it and move things around without changing their stores and wasting the time and energy of employees to constantly reset the store format.

Wal-Mart is certainly a crazy evil corporation, but it goes to show how companies can take advantage of virtual space in unique ways.

I pay my real life mortgage helping schools and universities build their virtual presence. Some of them are using it to build floorplans, much like Walmart. The advantage to doing this in SL versus something like a traditional 3D program is that your entire team can come inside and build together at the same time. The architecture department at our local university is getting into SL for exactly that reason, and their philosophy students are having an interesting time using it as a space to meet online (avoiding long commutes) to discuss the nature of virtual life.

Also Drew, you're completely overlooked all of the businesses in SL that are based entirely on sales within SL. There's hundreds of designers making a real life living cranking out virtual product there - clothes, buildings, you name it. Many of them employ people to staff their stores there and handle customer service, and as those people represent their brand, it would be reasonable to set some rules for them.

I think virtual dress codes in these situations are probably a good thing. I'd hope that professionals would understand the difference between showing up as a robot and showing up dressed like a dominatrix, but sometimes people need to be told in no uncertain terms.