cusleAll around nice guy, and superstar sans hair Mike Maney suggested a new title for this post – “SecondLife Heads for the Afterlife” – I kind of agree with him. Mike, this one’s for you….

I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last year when Linden Labs announced Second Life for Enterprise. I held no punches at the time and posted my thoughts thus:

Linden say that “Virtual worlds are the best alternative to face-to-face interaction” – in the session the audience were asked how many people had engaged in video conferences (everyone had) and how many had a good experience doing so (pretty much no one). Linden then effortlessly glided to the conclusion that virtual worlds would change all that. All because itcomes complete with both a lunar landscape environment and a spaceship one. Oh my!

It seems others have got a little hot and bothered about the opportunities these sorts of offerings give to the enterprise. In one case it’s Farmville for business – Oy Vey!

Now if Linden were selling a product that enables distributed virtual design of prototypes of real products maybe I’d buy into their schtick – but they’re not – it’s all just about selling crack – except at least with crack you get the initial high.

Well it seems that my curmudgenlyness was justified as Linden Labs announced this morning that they were “restructuring” in an effort to “generate efficiencies and support their investment in new platforms”.

As part of this “restructuring” the enterprise team is being disestablished. The unfortunately named CEO of Linden Labs, Mark Klingon Kingdon is spinning it well saying that:

We’ve emerged from a two-year investment period during which, among other things, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time improving reliability and the overall user experience. Today’s announcement about our reorganization will help us makeSecond Life® even simpler, more enjoyable, relevant and engaging for consumers starting with their first experience. It will also enable us to invest in bringing 3D to the web and will strengthen our profitability

BS… Second Life has had it’s day. Second Life Enterprise was a crazy idea and the investment they put into it was money wasted from the start. ‘buff said.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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