Philip Rosedale-Linden II: The Return – 3 keys for the next 100 days to make it happen…

So it seems things sometimes can happen when you really ask for it…

The cart where the 130 Lindens took place also made a stop at Mark Kingdon’s office and took them all for a new adventure… In French we use the word “charette” to talk about a lay-off, and a “charette” is this old open cart which used to take the aristocrats to the guillotine during the revolution… Fortunately no one should be guillotined here. Mark Kingdon surely tried his best, considering Second Life is such a different “product”, and actually I really wonder if Second Life is a product… It is in a way, but maybe you need a really 2.0 or 3.0 Marketing approach here, considering the community is really judge and part of the product.

Anyway, as I explained in my post “Second Life, engage me one more time!”, the place is cleaned and fit, and the Lab can start to work again. And they need it to be fast enough to stop the hemorrhage and reconquer both old resident hearts’s and new young hearts…
What is there in the head of Philip Rosedale? How do you feel after you stopped working on what was your motivation during so many years? How do you feel to return?

“Our thinking as a team is that my returning to the CEO job now can bring a product and technology focus that will help rapidly improve Second Life. We need to simplify and focus our product priorities—concentrating all our capabilities on making Second Life easier to use and better for the core experiences that it is delivering today. I think that I can be a great help and a strong leader in that process.

It is an honor to have a chance to help more directly again, and I come to this mission with energy, excitement, and an open mind about what we need and how we need to do it. I want to see Second Life continue to grow, amaze, and change the world. It’s what gets me up in the morning. Despite the challenges of such a big change, I am happy to be drafting this blog post while sitting in our San Francisco office, surrounded by the many Lindens who have made it all possible. »
Hopefully, that 2 years break was a time for Philip to resource, learn and take strength because he will need it. We all know when the community will have finish to rejoice, critics and resistances will come as usual.. And we also guess lots of things are in the pipe and that only a man with a deep inside vision is able to break the walls.

3 keys for the next 100 days.

As politics say, next 100 days of the new realm will be crucial in designing the future, even if we all know that the complexity behind Second Life forbid us to think it can be achieved in 100 days… Qui va piano va sano… but sometimes situations are willing men to take risks… and anticipate the moves as in a chess game.

My deep thought is that accessibility is a major key for a success. We definitely need to have :
- a Second Life for everyone, for residents, for education, for enterprise.
- a Second Life accessible no matter what is your system, firewall, terminal, etc.

Second key is called customization. I want to be able to build my own screen and design my own experience of Second Life, according to my needs. Compared to Ajax UI, Viewer 2 is pushy and generate lots of disorder if you use it multitasking. So the viewer should naturally leads to :
- an interactive, immersive and stable platform able to offer its residents all means to choose what and how they want to use it, and all means to create and produce content.

What about if third key would be the cool old long tail effect based on the fantastic collective intelligence that only Second Life residents can provide. Not only it would take part of a natural process of governance but it would also allow Second Life to definitely take the lead on its competitor.

Adoption and engagement will come naturally if the Lab is able to lead Second Life on those tracks, and give us a new kind of future called My Second Life, my world, my imagination…(does it ring a bell?)


I am born in a culture where idolatry was a sin and I definitely reject all kinds of cult of personality. But talking about Philip Rosedale’s soul last week, was a true feeling. Second Life is a piece of Philip’s soul and right now, Second Life cannot work without Philip Rosedale. That is a fact than Linden Lab’s board has realized. No matter if they are about or not to organize a beauty contest and sell the Lab. For sure, there is money and politics involved here too, but the whole story is also about a dream, and dreams are powerful, can move mountains especially when leadership is based on solid and complementary partnership. Think about Louis XIV and Colbert, or on a lower level, Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Berger. Big projects are made of realism and dreams. Second Life definitely needs both, to achieve its goal. Your dream Philip, and our dream too… Let’s make it happen together.
Enhanced by Zemanta


|

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Twitter
  • RSS