A press release from Linden Labs announces the departure of Cory Linden (Cory Ondrejka) from the Second Life team:
I can confirm that Cory Ondrejka, CTO, will be leaving Linden Lab at the end of this year, in order to pursue new professional challenges outside the company. I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank Cory for his tremendous contribution to the company and to Second Life, in terms of its original vision and ongoing progress.
It’s unclear from the statement the reasons for the departure (edit: and I haven’t investigated why) – it does seem an appropriate time for the departure of a CTO may be that Cory is taking the fall for the final straw in the camel’s back, namely given the asset issues, teleport problems, and other glitches of the past week. Although Cory was by many accounts engaging and intelligent, the CTO can hardly remain standing when Linden can’t seem to keep the grid stable for more than a week at a time, and needs to pull down for emergency maintenance headed into the holiday season.
(P.S. Did the asset server maintenance bug up anyone else’s experience – entire buildings just seem to disappear from view since this latest “fix”).
I’m not sure whether it’s a coincidence, but Linden is also looking for a new VP of Technical Operations which, in reporting to Philip himself, sounds a lot like what a CTO might do:
The VP of Technical Operations will report to the CEO, Philip Rosedale. The company’s compelling technology and tremendous value prop has positioned Linden Lab to become the market leader in the online virtual society space. As a result, the new VP of Technical Operations will help lead Linden Lab towards aggressive and expansive growth. This executive should be a forward thinking, passionate, and strategic individual who has effectively scaled high growth companies.
The in world issues have ZERO to do with the CTO stepping down. If you had followed the various posts/blogs and read up a bit more It would be really obvious that there are obviously managment issues and Corey even stated that he and the CEO simply do not see eye to eye on priorities or the directions SL is going.
The problems with SL has nothing to do with it. It’s already a part of Second Life. Without problems, it wouldn’t be SL.
As reported on CNET, (http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9832840-52.html) Philip and Cory no longer saw eye-to-eye. For how long this was the case I have no idea, and certainly the most recent spate of problems with the Grid hardly led to the termination. I find it hard to imagine Philip pulling out his hair and screaming “My gawd! Our residents can’t teleport! That’s unacceptable! You’re fired!”
Whether the purported e-mail from Philip to staff is true, there is little difference between the e-mail:
“Cory and I have differences in how we think Linden should be run, differences that in the past few months have become irreconcilable.”
and the official release:
“Therefore, Cory and I are in agreement that our paths, at this point in time at least, lie in different directions.”
The bottom line is there’s a “T” in CTO, and the CTO needs to work with the CEO. Which vision is right and which skill set is best suited to taking SL into the next phase of its evolution will only become clear in time or if Linden can do a better job communicating a broader set of priorities other than platitudes and Windlight.
Cory leaving did not result in the grid failures of the past few months, but an overall lack of coherence, performance, and sufficient progress did. This leaves it in Philip’s hands to bring his team into alignment with whatever his vision is and hope that it’s the right one.
Having said all that I also agree with Kabalyero – TP and grid issues don’t particularly phase me. This is messy, evolving, prototyping, mucky (excuse the pun) fun. Linux had Linus and Linden had Cory under Philip’s direction. Messy is good. Messy is chaos and chaos is the friend of creation. But please please can I have my inventory back?
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[...] who was instrumental in building Second Life, left under, um, prompting from Philip Rosedale. In fact, his employment was terminated by e-mail as I [...]