It's tempting to characterize Linden Lab as a goofball organization that consistently makes the wrong decisions, driving their premier product, Second Life, into virtual oblivion. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Success is hard to argue with (not impossible, as many people do try to argue the fact of it anyway), and Second Life is a success for the Lab. While the Lab is as prone as any organization to making mistakes that can be described as avoidable or boneheaded, all the key decisions that have allowed it to become profitable and maintain profitability and growth pretty much went right.
Second Life remains a success. So why does the Lab look like a goof?
It's largely a matter of experiences and data. Allow us to draw an example from life.
One Second Life user who has coached literally thousands of individual users through orientation and beyond has never found a single user that has any trouble with the basics of the user-interface. Sure, intermediate and advanced functions are laid out rather confusingly, but the interface itself has never presented a problem for any of her charges.
For most of the last year, Linden Lab has been focusing its efforts on making the interface simpler and easier to understand. Given such a body of evidence that the interface just isn't the problem, doesn't that look like a waste of time on the Lab's part, when there are so many other aspects that could stand that time and attention?
No.
You see there's another side to this story. What you almost never see are the thousands of users per day who fail to grasp the user-interface. You don't see them, because they leave. Most of them don't come back – though they might if the word got around that the UI was substantively improved.
Someone who fails to grasp the basics of the user-interface is someone you've never met in Second Life. They never get so far as to actually talking to anyone. They might not ever even take ten steps in the virtual environment before they give up.
Roughly ten thousand (round-figure) new Second Life accounts get created every day. At any given time during the day there's probably about 200 of them in the orientation areas. Probably 90% of those don't last a half hour.
That's something the Lab can see very well from the figures it has, but which is more or less invisible to all of the rest of us. We can only surmise it from the numbers that we do have. Linden Lab, however, has more detailed figures, logs and exit polls, and a much better grasp of what's going wrong for those 90%+ people than any of the rest of us will ever have.
Likewise, if you see Linden Lab hammering on Xstreet, or the Lindex, it isn't being done on a whim. The Lab doesn't allocate resources that way. It's being done because there's a real case justifying the work. What and how it gets implemented, well there's just as much chance that the Lab can get it as wrong as anyone else. Or as right.
Does that mean our individual, personal experiences in Second Life aren't really that useful compared to the Lab's numbers?
No. The numbers only go so far, and only show a part of the picture – though for some areas it's a very good picture indeed. For all their work on the platform, and their efforts to use the platform itself, both for work and for off-hours recreation, Linden Lab staffers – as an organization – don't really have the sort of exposure to identify more complex, lasting and subtle factors that differentiate between a medium-term success and a long-term success.
The Lab's going to need a lot of help with that, but making sure that those factors become important is more of a priority right now. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that the Lab is foolish. Its communications strategy might be a shambles, but its success implies that it knows how to run a business and how to target its development efforts.
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