The problem is, it simply has no VALUE worth anywhere near $50,000. Most certainly not the other wild numbers being thrown out.

Desmond above further illustrated some of the obvious and most simple things Second Life can’t do, like open a document or spreadsheet, do any kind of filesharing whatsoever. Yes you can pass notecards, upload textures, and even use Shared Media now, but that only exasberates the issue that you’re paying $50,000 for the novelty of 3D wrapped around something less functional and less supported than notepad, powerpoint and the browsers we already have.

You gotta take Second Life out of its silo when considering its worth for something like Enterprise, not just throw around price points and repackagings of the same ol’ thing and feel any could be right. At the moment as a business collaboration tool, it does less than free products like a simple combination of Skype and Google Docs. It’s a far cry from even Cisco’s WebEx which is only tens of dollars a month. C’mon, features that lend towards productivity matter, not novelty.

theres a corporate selling point.. “weve given you over a millions peoples other IP for free”

“now use our service and company to virtualize your business…” uh huh…

frankley id loved for them to try it… and we can finally have a high level court case that will end the web2.0 “free slave” work methods of these companies…. or not end it, legalize it, and we can go back to fuedalism or slavery for “content producer like crop pickers.”

then again, NO IT department ever bought software/hardware that was “fast fun easy”…that more than the cost per license… is how they work…self survival first.;)

Luxury items really have to be a lot better and a lot more expensive for people to sit up and take notice.e.g. the advertising budgets for perfumes.

I think you are absolutely right with Enterprise, everything should be ‘in the box’… a ‘turn-key’ operation…. maybe even hardware rental.

And as for the enterprise market… not all companies have an edgy, collaborative core. Sure, some might, in some areas… but the hard truth is that a lot of corporate work is simply not creative on a ‘let’s build a prototype together’ level. The use case might be for a more polished, ‘meeting or presentation only’ sort of scenario. Boring perhaps to the artsy types, but still a real market.

Regarding liquidity ~ it’s well known that companies almost as a rule never recover gracefully, if ever, from layoffs as deep as 30%. Unless that 30% was fluff in the first place, and with Linden Research that clearly wasn’t the case. If those layoffs weren’t the result of a liquidity crisis… it had to be something far, far worse. Perhaps as simple but disastrous as a realignment of goals. For such a young technology company, the analogy would be a kid ditching out of college (and all its expenses) in order to pursue a lifetime career in fast food preparation. Let’s *hope* it was a mere liquidity crisis that brought on such change, considering the possible alternative reasons.

At bottom, like Soylent Green, Linden Research is… people. Not IP, not tech, not assets, but intelligence and strategy and integrity in whatever proportions they can muster. All else is secondary. Lots of companies tried losing their early management personnel and vision over the years ~ Hewlett Packard and Apple for example. We’ve seen how that works out.

Sharepoint has actual…value and uses.

‘less I’m missing a whole lot about SL Enterprise, it didn’t do anything in the way of accomplishing what Sharepoint accomplishes, or much of Oracle’s software. Or again, even Google Docs or a host of free tools out there.

http://work.secondlife.com/en-US/products/server/)*

vs.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx

I mean come on now, 200k? 50k was bad enough for essentially getting a differently limited OpenSim.

I understand the marketing and branding principle of pricing luxury/high, but correlating value can’t be thrown completely out of the window. Second Life Enterprise didn’t fail because it was priced too low and got lost amongst budget enterprise software or somesuch, it failed because it provides little or no value, especially considering what 50 grand can get a company elsewhere.

Second Life isn’t going to work in enterprise because quite frankly, Linden Lab isn’t an enterprise facing company. That isn’t knocking the platform whatsoever, afterall, Linden Lab is the lifeblood of the virtual world platform, but they simply can’t compete in providing solutions in a space where Microsoft and Oracle are competing.

That doesn’t mean Linden Lab shouldn’t continue with their ‘Work’ initiative, but they do need to lower the trajectory some to the broader market of small to mid-size businesses.

I totally agree with you.

The enterprise focused companies I talk to — ProtonMedia, Teleplace — can easily pull in well in the six figures for a single corporate virtual world deployment.

And their products are nice — with corporate intergration — but all this can be available in Second Life and OpenSim, as well. In fact, there’s $50,000 product from IBM that has corporate directory integration.

I’m surprised yet that there aren’t $200K-and-up products out yet, with vendors building a more fully-featured product on top of OpenSim, including more enterprise integration (SharePoint), and content management features.

– Maria

BTW – how are your enterprise sales going? Just curious, since you don’t have the encumbrances of someone whose thumb you’re under?”

dusan, enjoy your delusion. you dont see the difference between using a tool, working with a partner, or just wagging a dogs tail and whose leash youre wearing this 5 year cycle…..fine.

your analogies to a pre digital media industry is flawed, and your blog posts in this area…well you said it “off the deep end”. If youd like to discuss the creative services /media industry and whats changed and how over 50 years, maybe one day we can do that.

as to “my enterprise” well mine is a fictional starship named ncc -1701…

as to yours..well.

one day you may awake to find your enterprise as fictional if you continue to believe following “media /software/platform” companies funded by VCs is a sane model for a creative services industry or professional.

My ideas are grounded in the last 25 years.. i have no idea where you find your evidence to the contrary from.

evil overlords?..no just naive or untruthful evangelists who feed a system that isnt sustainable or imo ethical to a broader culture no facing a further increase of virtuality affecting their lives and freedoms.

I believe ‘Enterprise’ has to be defined. Obviously the way it was done before was very Oracle-ish, with marketing material presented and the deals secured one at a time. It involved Linden provided hardware setups too, no? I might be wrong.

Either way, they really shouldn’t try the whole five-digit price point thing again, because they aren’t Oracle nor Microsoft, and Second Life as is accomplishes best only being a virtual meeting place which is about the only thing the likes of IBM ever bragged about when touting SL Enterprise. It doesn’t help a corporation with managing product life cycles, human resources, customer relationships, business intelligence and financial management, so on and so forth. Tools like Sharepoint accompliah all of this and Second Life, while neat, only offers the novelty of 3D while there’s more productivity to be had in Google Docs even.

Really, for what Second Life accomplishes, even a 300 dollar tier on a region isn’t worth it for a small business let alone a big 100,000 person corporation. Even as a virtual meeting and collaboration tool of sorts, its overpriced and has less features than say, BaseCamp.

In general, take away the novelty of 3D, what’s the longterm value? Granted I may be harsh in calling 3D a novelty, but I don’t see the $50,000 value in it if thats the sole justification of SL Enterprise having been a product at all. I can get 3D’er with a video Skype call.

There are some things I liked about the Enterprise offering, like the idea of a marketplace. But that brings to light other downsides to Second Life right now; its development platform is fairly primitive being driven by LSL still and all. Programming a mod for WoW has more transferrable skills. Were Linden Lab to swap out LSL for C# ontop of Mono finally, then at least it becomes something employee skills transfer into via the million of Microsoft ISVs and all the programmers in that ecosystem and Mono’s.

There’s a lot to think about, but basically I think:

1. Forget the Fortune 500, target the Fortune 5,000,000. That implies: a. Host the service (which in this case means provide land with permission lists as always). b. Charge tier at more dynamic and scalable rates, starting cheaper. c. Forget ‘Enterprise’ and big-client driven solutions. Linden Lab just isn’t an Oracle.

2. Fix the development platform. Dropping the homebrew sculptmap stuff for meshes via COLLADA solves a whole half of the issue and two years ago I wouldn’t have expected it. Drop LSL next and bring in C#, which I expected 2 years ago.