RSSLinden Lab CTO leaves the real world of Second Life
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published December 13, 2007, 11:51 AM
In an apparent split at the top, one of Second Life's founding employees has left the company, and his former boss apparently bids him a heartfelt good riddance.
Linden Labs CTO Cory Ondrejka, the fourth employee to be hired by the producer of the Second Life virtual world, left the company this week -- apparently at the decision of his boss Philip Rosedale, who publicly signaled his desire for completion of a new user interface as well as his unhappiness over the site's frequent crashes as early as late November.
In an internal memo obtained by an external blogger, Ondrejka told other former fellow employees this week that Linden Lab founder and CEO Rosedale's visions for the future were different enough from his own that Rosedale has now "decided to lead in his own way."
"I continue to believe in both Second Life and Linden Lab, but Philip and my visions for the future of Linden Lab are divergent enough that he decided to lead in his own way," Ondrejka wrote, in an internal memo posted by blogger Moo Money.
Ondrejka's e-mail came in response to an earlier internal memo by Rosedale, who told Second Life's employees that he and Linden have been experiencing "differences in how we think Linden should be run, differences that in the past few months have become irreconcilable."
Also according to Rosedale: "I feel that we need a different set of strengths in engineering leadership."
At the same time, Rosedale credited Linden with being "a huge part of of the company, having designed big part of [Second Life], hired many people, contributed greatly to the culture, and given a powerful voice to SL and [Linden Lab]."
But Rosedale actually started hinting at his displeasure over engineering issues as early as late November, when he used his blog on Second Life to signal a change in direction for the company -- away from frequent site crashes and toward a new user interface, for example.
"Our weakest link is now clearly crashing (both client and server), and we are going to very substantially reduce it over the next two quarters," Rosedale told members of the Second Life community.
"We aren't there yet in terms of the interface for virtual worlds. There is now a small new internal team doing nothing else, so expect real progress."
In other Web postings over the past year, Second Life staff has been warning users of impending shutdowns, and users have been complaining -- sometimes bitterly -- to Linden Lab as well as among themselves.
On the user interface side, Second Life acquired WindLight last spring, with plans to integrate its atmospheric and cloud simulation technologies into the client-side Second Life Viewer, and of open-sourcing the code.
Clearly, some of the obvious tensions between Rosedale and Ondrejka spring from competitve pressures surrounding the rapid growth of virtual communities on the Web.
These tensions "were more manageable when we were smaller, and there have been times that they have helped us do great work together," Rosedale wrote in his internal memo.
According to industry analysts at the Gartner Group, five years from now, as many as 80% of active Internet users -- amounting to 250 million people -- will be participating in virtual worlds.
Meanwhile, although Second Life is the dominant virtual world on the Web, with some 11 million members, it is hardly the only virtual world around. Up-and-comer Kaneva, for example, now claims membership of at least 800,000 visitors.
"According to industry analysts at the Gartner Group, five years from now, as many as 80% of active Internet users..."
Gartner Group - The "Miss Cleo" of technology.
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----- that he and Linden have been experiencing "differences in how we think Linden should be run, differences that in the past few months have become irreconcilable."
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---- At the same time, Rosedale credited Linden with being "a huge part of of the company, having designed big part of [Second Life], hired many people, contributed greatly to the culture, and given a powerful voice to SL and [Linden Lab]." -----
Don't you mean Ondrejka, not Linden?
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This doesn't in fact surprise me, in the last couple years LL has grown from a handful of employees to a one with maybe hundred scattered across the globe. It appears what we are seeing is the result of growing pains.
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I every so often try out Second life and I don't see it. Maybe at some point they'll add features that will make it more fun. I didn't like the building tools, I didn't like the environments, I didn't like the graphics. Maybe the new Multiverse network will be better. You'll have MMO's built into it and maybe some other interesting things.
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It's a stepping stone. A decent proof of concept. Someone will come along and make a better version that is much more open-ended and useful. I read the other day that IBM is working on something like that now. As for second life, I don't see it either.
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11 million members my ***.
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Yeah... what's the average number of identities each member has???
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11 million _registrations_, about half milion of players who really do log sometimes. And much less active players. That "universe" is very small in fact. Marketing hype is very big.
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