In light of the Lab’s decision to purchase OnRez and XStreet, it’s interesting to look back on the interview with Philip on Metanomics the previous day. Here’s the clip:

From the full transcript on Metanomics.

“Philip: That picture of me standing there, having that amazing moment where I was trying to convince everybody at that time; Second Life was less than a thousand people that were, oh gosh, probably almost less than a thousand people ever, and a few hundred people who were really actively using it. I at that time, at the end of 2003, had to convince everybody that it would be okay to allow entrepreneurial in world and that’s exactly the question you were just asking people that are just working in world, in Second Life, to make money. Everybody was saying that that was a terrible idea, and it would kill Second Life and that all we would care about, as a company, would be then helping those people make money and that nothing else would matter to us.

And so now the question is, in other words, as every new wave of change comes into Second Life, there is an appropriate fear that gets voiced by the community, that says, “Well, all Linden Lab is going to do is care about the new wave, whoever they are.” So I would say six or twelve months ago, you’d be talking about education. We’re still talking a lot about education. We’re also talking about groupware, people using Second Life for work and small teams having meetings. I think what history has shown is that I think we’ve been reasonable as a company, and we’ve always maintained a balanced approach, where we’ve assumed that no one application for Second Life will ever be the majority of Second Life use. I think that’s the clearest way to state it.

Our operating principle and assumption, which I think has always been true and certainly continues to be proven true, is that no single thing that people are doing in Second Life will come to be the defining experience that we must, as a company, solely or primarily support. I don’t think that’s true. It certainly wasn’t true at the end of 2003. It wasn’t true when Second Life became really well known, and people started putting up islands in it. It isn’t true about education and business use today, so I think we have to continue to steer a course where we support everybody fairly uniformly, with the assumption that, like the internet, there’s not going to be one killer app in Second Life. I guess, in the strongest words possible, I would say that is not what we’re doing. We’re not looking at any particular change in usage and saying we need to put all our resources behind that. “