Linden Lab’s staff reductions are apparently continuing as we push on through Q3 this year.
It’s difficult to pin exact numbers down, as the Lab has declined to be very specific, but with some reductions in Q1, 5% in April, 30% in March and more since then, my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the staff reductions are approaching 45-50% since the beginning of this year so far.
This roughly meshes with my notion that the Lab would lay off 50-60% of the staff by the end of the year. While it’s hard to pin down, given the scarcity of data, it does actually appear that Linden Lab has been planning an approximately 60% reduction in staff given the numbers cut out of particular teams. Well, either that or something else has gone wahoonie-shaped that we don’t know about yet.
The whole picture is a little muddled by other patterns of hiring and departure through 2010, of course, but yes. My gut feeling from the available info is that things will settle at around 60% by the end of September, if all goes well.
“If all goes well”? Yes, it doesn’t sound very good, does it? But it will mean that the company is still there, and hasn’t gone all belly-up.com – which would be the worst possible outcome for everyone, including Linden Lab’s competitors. Few people would actually want to see the Lab go out of business, and it certainly appears to be making all the right moves to ensure that it doesn’t.
Something I can’t get a straight answer to is the question about staff numbers. Linden Lab outsources a number of things, and doesn’t talk much about them, but has been known to include the number of people working for call centres and so forth into its headcount figures.
Last I looked, Accounts Payable and almost all of Customer Service (live chat, phone support etc) was being dealt with by companies other than the Lab. Those numbers could well make the Lab look bigger than it is, and skew a lot of other figures.
In any case, reductions continue slow and steady at present and we can only guess at the reasoning behind them.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tateru Nino and Daniel Voyager, Lena Franciosa. Lena Franciosa said: RT @taterunino: Linden Lab layoffs continue « Dwell On It http://bit.ly/bxqUoN [...]
Will you expand why you think the Lab going “all belly-up.com [ ... ] would be the worst possible outcome for everyone, including Linden Lab’s competitors.” ?
The only negative scenario I can envision at the moment for the competitors is a flood of thousands of SL refugees signing up for other grids (which are more-or-less all still “in beta”) and overtaxing their resources (which, being founded on the OpenSimulator server software, are still officially “in alpha”). I don’t see that as being very likely.
For one thing, the current technical limitations of the other grids will probably discourage the more casual end of SL’s user base. OpenSim grids are neither fast nor easy, and the types of fun to be had are (so far) not as diverse. For another, there is the idea that one is literally starting over in terms of avatar appearance – not merely from the relatively high-quality “starter” avatars the Lab provides, but from the legendary Ruth some of us remember from before 2007.
Put another way: should SL sink into the pixel sea, the spin-off grids may see an influx of sign-ups, but not much in the way of retention. As most of the alternative grids have a different business model and mindset than Linden Lab has, I’m not convinced that worry about a lack of retention will distract the admins of those grids from their dedication to improvement in performance.
So… what is my imagination of possible futures missing?
The rising tide lifts all boats. What’s good for the industry as a whole is good for its participants.
Conversely, something high-profile like SL sinking would damage the reputation of the industry as a whole, and reduce interest in it. However small a player Google’s Lively was, its closure hurt public perception of virtual environments as a going concern. Ditto the closure of there.com.
Not a vast impact, but significant. The last thing any of the Lab’s competitors want to see is to see the Lab crash and burn. Run second? Run last, even? Sure. Everyone wants to be in front. But if a commercial success like SL has been can suddenly turn around and collapse (metaphorically) overnight? That could happen to any of them.
And these environments, as I’ve noted previously, run on faith. If we don’t believe in them and their operators enough, we don’t go.
Without faith in virtual environments, generally, the opensim grid could well wind up in the same position as previous generations of online virtual environments: A niche-corner of the Internet with a small market of users shared between them; barely noticed by the public at large, and ultimately not sustainable for more than a decade or two without enough growth to offset attrition.
Can you name even twenty of the several thousand online virtual environments that existed in the 1980s and 1990s? I could probably name six without having to resort to a search engine. That, in essence, is the problem. Too small an audience means you’re sidelined and forgotten.
Well if LL does take the swandive into oblivion I don’t think I will bother again. Maybe a sim or 4 housed personally and accesible to other grids [if they ever reach that stage]. That would make for a dynamic linked world to be sure.
I think the worst thing that could happen is a splintering of LL as we know it. Core groups forming offshoots. Maybe ‘worst’ is not the word.
“The rising tide lifts all boats.” Very good quote, Tateru. I remain positive and hopeful, both for Linden Lab as well as for LL’s customers.
And I most strongly feel that the pioneering folks who are creating amazing things in SL will have a bright future no matter what happens to the platform. Tools currently exist for content creators to move their own creations to OpenSim, so creative effort spent in SL can migrate to other grids if need be. Diasporas are often opportunities.
Plus, who knows what amazing new platforms are in the wings?
Tarring the entire non-gaming virtual environment milieu with the brush of SL is risky… which is what the “tide/boats” analogy looks like, as does characterizing it in the aggregate as an “industry”. I also detect the “niche bad, mainstream good” mantra, which I have always been convinced is false. Curiously enough, between my last comment and this one, I’ve been made aware of Gwyneth Llewelyn’s latest post – http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2010/08/07/what-have-you-achieved/ – to which I was directed by Botgirl: http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-makes-second-life-and-virtual.html [never mind that I'm its tutelary subject]. I recommend them to reinforce my own point.
“… the opensim grid could well wind up in the same position as previous generations of online virtual environments: A niche-corner of the Internet with a small market of users shared between them; barely noticed by the public at large, and ultimately not sustainable for more than a decade or two without enough growth to offset attrition.”
This is a problem? Anyone who spends much time in VE’s like Second Life understand that nothing is permanent, save perhaps the records we make of them. Funny thing is: the non-virtual world works like that, too. A decade is a loooooong time, technologically (SL itself is just over 8 years old). Eventually, new software and hardware will render — pun intended — VE’s running SL-style code (including OpenSim) obsolete, anyway. Meanwhile, the niches that exist today will have allowed the kinds of people who are naturally attracted to them — those who are capable, as Gwyneth puts it, of self-entertainment — to survive, cross-pollinate, and evolve with the tech.
We avatars will never be a significant fraction of the planet’s population. Neither are the people who visit art museums, or attend orchestral concerts and operas…. yet those niches survive, as do thousands of others.
[...] world commentators/analysts I most value reading. She estimates that layoffs at Linden Research will total 60% by the end of September, “if all goes well”: “If all goes well”? Yes, it doesn’t sound very good, does [...]
I find it hard to believe that someone with a bit more business sense would not try and do a VW platform that made money and grew.
Surely the weight of money now going in to VWs makes A Future more certain?
Curious. The Phyneas Jack Memorial Trust has reduced it’s mainland tier by about the same percentage over the past year. From five full mainland regions to two and a half. We sold or transferred some of Kahruvel’s outlying property in southern Noyo, southern Davenport, Palomarian and Myrtle and kept the forest’s tahra intact in Bodega, northern Davenport, northern Noyo, Cowell, Stinson and Rodeo. The Trust has felt the same squeeze it would appear. (Thank G’al that boatload of lumber we sent to Nautilus fetched a decent price!)
@Pathfinder I remain hopeful also. As to whether I should feel positive … I have insufficient data to form an opinion on that at this time.
@Lalo Actually, there’s nothing wrong with being a niche – so long as you’re a sufficiently large niche to be a self-sustaining one. The mass-market, ultimately, is nothing more than a massive gallimaufry of niches. Each niche, however, requires a critical mass to be self-sustaining. Niches that reach that mass persist, and those that don’t wither (and ultimately reappear a decade or two down the track). Avoiding any of those long Winters would seem to me to be desirable to all of us involved with virtual environments.
@Soror Perhaps. Approximately 70% of all new business ventures fail, however. Given competent management and a solid product, the failure rate might drop as low as 40-50%. Even under ideal circumstances, success is far from certain.
Tautero –
I completely agree with you that loss of Second Life would hurt other virtual worlds. This is especially true for OpenSim, where Second Life serves several key functions.
1. Training. Since the viewers and building tools are the same, individuals — and employees, and students — can go to Second Life for free or low-cost training programs and orientation sessions. Also, there is a wealth of information on the Second Life wikis, blogs, and YouTube, almost all of which is directly applicable to OpenSim.
2. Content. OpenSim users can go to Second Life content creators for scripts, objects, even custom designs. Yes, these guys will still be around if Second Life folds — somewhere — but they will be much harder to find. (Remember to ask permission before taking purchased content off-grid!)
3. Marketing. Second Life’s marketing budget dwarfs those of all the OpenSim grids combined. That’s a lot of publicity for virtual worlds — and when people look into it, they might decide they want something like Second Life, but with lower prices or fewer restrictions (and with region backups and enterprise integration). All the Second Life blogs, forums, machinima and other user-generated media also help to drum up awareness.
And the big one:
4. Standards. There is no WWW Consortium, no ICAAN, for virtual worlds. Anybody can take OpenSim, modify to whatever extent they want, and create a new universe. The mainline OpenSim guys (and gals!) have pegged their development path to Second Life compatibility: users should be able to take any of the standard Second Life viewers and go into any standard OpenSim grid. You still have spin-offs, like realXtend, InWorldz, and OpenLifeGrid, but for the most part the OpenSim universe is all moving lock-step in the same direction. This means that OpenSim users can take advantage of factors 1,2, and 3 above, and also enjoy the ability to move entire regions from one grid to another, and, of course, to teleport between grids via hypergrid teleport.
– Maria
soon the entire lab will be run by bots….. but you all knew that was the plan anyway..right?
singular c3
@Tateru – I agree with you, the rising tide is very signifiant. The success of any environment, whether based on Linden Lab’s code, OpenSim, Blue Mars or something else enlarge the significance of the sector far more than any loss from competition, in my opinion.
However, even if Linden Lab were to fail, I think that OpenSim could still succeed for several reasons. Firstly, Linden Lab have shown that a virtual world can be profitably sustainable, even if they’ve stumbled a little now. This is a powerful idea that will keep developers and enterpreneurs trying even if the worst were to happen. And they’ve established a pool of people who know about, like and are even passionate about being in these environments.
Secondly, unlike the systems of the 80s and 90s, Second Life is a much more complete virtual environment. Not only is it graphically more sophisticated (albeit some way from the cutting edge) but it provides a ready means for people to login to the same place, have an inventory, IM other avatars, look up their freinds, etc.). This opens a much wider set of imaginative uses than was possible in previous decades.
Thirdly, because Linden Lab have open-sourced the client, this won’t go away even if the parent company disappears. In some terms it’s an imperfect open-sourcing – the company retains a private code repository and doesn’t have external people in key decision-making positions (these are problems which Linden Lab have acknowledged themselves). But nevertheless, the code is out there are will continue to be extended by independent developers – the loss of the parent company, if it ever happens, could even be a blessing in disguise.
These factors combine with some of the particular features of the OpenSim project. Not only is OpenSim open-source, of course (unlike many of the proprietary platforms of earlier decades), but it’s also BSD licensed, which tends to be good for spreading basic technology since companies don’t need to deal with any licensing worries. OpenSim is also not an open-source project that is dominated by a single company, so it’s relatively resilient against business failure. And being open-source (and hence free in monetary terms) encourages a huge amount of market experimentation, both in the social grid space and in all the uses bubbling under that really benefit from people being able to create models, walk around those models and talk about them in the same virtual space (education, training, serious games, architecture, design, etc.)
In the long term, OpenSim also embodies efforts to create a genuinely distributed virtual environment. Second Life today (and by inheritance, OpenSim’s implementation of an SL environment), as I’m sure you know, is based around a central set of asset, inventory and other services, even if the regions themselves are distributed across machines. This currently makes it impossible for an avatar to travel between completely independent installations with identity, appearance and inventory intact.
However, efforts such as Crista Lopes’ Hypergrid show a genuine path to achieving that kind of travel. I think this will be a much slower technical burn than people think, since a huge amount of architectural change is required, both on the server and on the viewer side. But if this kicks in there will be a powerful network effect, since people will be able to move between independent VE installations as easily as one can click on a hyperlink today.
For these reasons, I think that OpenSim (and other open-source environments once enough common protocols shake out) now have a real shot at surviving and flourishing in the long term, no matter what happens to Linden Lab.
@Maria – I agree with many of your points – OpenSim does derive enormous benefit from providing a Second Life environment.
And it does tend to closely follow Linden Lab innovations as debuted in the viewer (though I would also point towards the Hypergrid, Megaregions, OARs and IARs as features developed completely independently of Linden Lab).
However, this isn’t because there’s a plan to move in lock-step. Rather, it’s a natural consequence of the fact that Second Life is the most popular general virtual environment/world out there, and one with an open-source viewer. Hence, implementing these provides the greatest utility to the most people, which I feel is a lot of what open-source is about. It’s also relatively cheap, since all the design work has been done for us.
Don’t underestimate how hard it is to innovate rather than follow – there need to be people with time and freedom to think strategically rather than tactically and this time (effectively money) can be in short supply. Nonetheless, OpenSim already incorporates features that aren’t found elsewhere and I think that strong ideas will continue to emerge in the future, particularly as these gain long-term strength by concensus and usefullness rather than corporate fiat.
And don’t mistake the lack of a consortium as a barrier to the emergence of standards. The best of these tend to come about from successful implementations rather than being decided up front by a committee. Hypergrid is a case in point – this is generating more interest from its actual early implementations than has come about from the now somewhat moribund VWRAP/OGP process.
@Maria – I re-read your comment and I think that I misaddressed what you were saying with point 4
– you’re saying that the Second Life ‘standard’, as controlled by a dominant Linden Lab, helps ensure compatibility between different viewers and OpenSim.
It’s an interesting point. However, I feel that if Linden Lab disappeared then it wouldn’t lead to the fragmentation that you fear. Sure, there might be more experimentation (which in itself could be a very good thing) but I think that the network effects gained from a viewer being able to access as many virtual environments as possible would outweigh the advantage of specialising in one. And if a different or altered open-sourced protocol was sufficiently successful then its ideas would be adopted by the majority over time.
SL sort of forms the entry-level threshold for VR. People see SL in TV shows, read about it, hear about it, and join it. Then they either sink or swim. After a few weeks/months ISL, they hear about other grids, and other VR browsers, and some take that on, others are content to stay ISL.
It’s a good triage mechanism for other grids, and if SL were to founder and go titsup, then a lot of noobs may never rez. Or worse, flood the other grids and bog them down.
Now I want your RL selves to imagine this: Imagine that you’re fully disabled IRL, you’ve gone all out and had a range of implants to be able to sense and feel and pretty much virtually exist online and in VRs and general Internet sites. It’s going to happen, of course. We are constantly pushing the envelope, when I was a teenager there were no personal computers, when I was a young adult there were Commodore-64′s and Amstrads, now there are processors more powerful than that driving my microwave. As a kid I read about Superman, as a teenager I was skeptical of Six Million Dollar Man, today I read about a man getting a full face transplant, another getting a bionic arm and hand that is almost eerie in its capabilities, and people are talking about implanting chips to interface their brains to their electronics…
When it does, our current state of VR will seem like the old Cello browser compared to Chrome, and we’ll look back on the current grids the same way Lalo referred to “the legendary Ruth…” If Linden Labs and SL are still around then, we can expect that they’ll have competition, and LL collapsing won’t be a loss of a major chunk of infrastructure – but for now, yes, LL needs to be there.
[...] incredibly insightful and a whiz with statistics (plus i love her writing style – btw, great post tonite on Linden [...]
if Linden did close, it would be an easy out for may corporate users to simply say “that Second Life thing flopped so virtual worlds suck”
but at the same time, if LL did close it could clear a little air too. LL, while successful, also helped portray the idea that virtual worlds are full of weirdos
whether they keep going or not has little impact in my opinion. MySpace was all the rage five years ago and there are many (probably most i would guess) that never had a MySpace account but have a facebook account
they are both as close to each other in function as SL is to OpenSim but not many people consider what MySpace was and is when starting in facebook. it’s fairly irrelevant
that’s just my view, the view of an avatar about to get cancelled by LL! oh well . . .
thanks for a very interesting article on the layoffs!