People are talking about a rumour that Microsoft has made an offer on Linden Lab.
Funny as that might seem on the face of it, a small number of Linden Lab staff are today spreading the story that Linden Lab is now entertaining offers for sale, and that Microsoft has actually presented one.
For Microsoft’s part, I doubt that it could care less about Linden Lab, but might be willing to make an offer to stop certain competitors making that purchase.
As yet, there isn’t any confirmation from Linden Lab as to whether the information being given by its staff is correct.
Update: Linden Lab responded to my query, and has declined to proffer any confirmation or denial.
Another update: Two Labbers say that there was an offer – which was rejected – but that they don’t believe it to have been from Microsoft.
So what do you think this means, Tateru? A few possibilities off the top of my head:
1. Rumors meant to boost morale / public opinion about the company.
2. Philip saw how much of a mess M left the company, and didn’t think it was worth it? (Not sure that’s likely.)
3. Investors just tired after 10 years, nervous, and looking to cash out?
4. The XBox team said, “Well, I suppose Sony Home isn’t going away, even if it’s lame and mismanaged. Let’s go get our own.”
5. Microsoft hasn’t been in the VW game, and right now LL’s valuation is about as cheap as it’s going to get, and so they made a low offer?
Makes sense on Linden Lab’s end. I believe you yourself projected just a few reasons the layoffs occurred, and one was getting ‘slim’ for acquisition.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on Microsoft’s end though. Especially in a year where it’s had 0 acquisitions thus far. It seems kind of weird they’d open the purse strings for a company so completely unrelated to and devoid of their products and services. How would Microsoft benefit from owning a virtual world? I can’t think of a single long term strategy of Microsoft’s that’d benefit from Second Life.
That being said, I’d love if Microsoft got its hands on it. Talk about new life for Second Life.
The only way I could see this making strategic sense for Microsoft is if they wanted to buy-and-bury it. It doesn’t seem to fit with their tactical or strategic goals, except insofar as it would deny anyone else the property.
@Hiro: Yes, the whole shed-everything-outside-of-the-USA looks like a readiness-for-sale move in retrospect. As for the rest, I want to think about it some more.
I’ve contacted the Lab for comment. Assuming no long delay or stony silence, the result should be interesting.
If this is a real acquisition by a publicly traded company, you should receive stony silence from all formal channels. That’s the way i’m made to understand it has to be under SEC rules.
Past that, I think this actually fits well with microsoft games and taking the infrastructure, especially if the patent portfolio comes with it.
@Hiro
1. It’d take a web behemoth like Microsoft, Google or Amazon to get Second Life to where we all want it to be, so most definitely I believe such an acquisition would return to Linden Lab the kind of hype it had half a decade or so ago before all of the “its still alive?” crap started. I always figured Linden Lab would try and grow into that behemoth itself however…but I guess it hasn’t really grown as a company in some while, due to its userbase not growing.
2. Linden Lab is profitable as far as we know. its business model is sound. There’s been some scary doomsday scenarios that bloggers like Tateru have brought up, such as the “what if” scenarios regarding big landholders leaving, but in general I don’t think Linden Lab loses money without making money with its current business model. I don’t think Philip has reason to be desperate or running scared.
3. And yeah, there’s that, the fact Philip isn’t the only vested interest in those kinds of matters.
4. Sony Home bombed for all intents and purposes. Xbox Avatars makes Microsoft a LOT of money. If you Google “xbox live online sales” or similar, you’ll find Microsoft made over a billion this year off avatar related stuff. They’re also investing in them this Fall to work with Kinect. Highly unlikely Microsoft is looking to swap their Avatar system with some Xbox Live/Second Life merger in an effort to be not-so-similar-to Home. Not to mention that’d fundamentally alter Second Life.
5. That could be it too. Its a slimmer company in terms of employees, its segmented off the adult areas, its shed the teen grid, and it might be a much cheaper and safer purchase than it has been in recent years.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tateru Nino, Laura P Thomas, Gavin Dudeney, robin teigland, Katherine Mancuso and others. Katherine Mancuso said: RT @taterunino: Linden Lab entertaining offers http://bit.ly/bxF58n [...]
[...] made a bid for purchase of Linden Lab, with the rumor apparently being spread by Lab employees. Tateru Nino is also writing this up as a [...]
@Ezra:
1. Sounds reasonable.
2. Yeah, after stripping 1/3 of the staff. Funny you should say they have a sound business model, but I might disagree. From earlier this week: http://www.secondtense.com/2010/09/linden-lab-has-no-apparent-business.html
4. I agree with how bad Home flopped, but Sony is still putting money into it and developing it. Now, as for XBox, I hadn’t realized just how profitable the avatars were; that’s astounding if your numbers are correct. As for Kinect, I almost forgot about it, because I’ve pretty much written it off. http://www.secondtense.com/2009/11/project-natal-forget-gaming-its-virtual.html — though, hm. Maybe they came around to my way of seeing it. I think Kinect nee Natal could be made into a really compelling virtual world tool. Combining it with Second Life might be a really cool use.
Microsoft has been playing around with OpenSim for the past year over at ReactionGrid (and, most recently with the Unity-Jibe platform as well) and they might have decided that they see the future of the 3D Web coming, and want to get in ahead of it.
Imagine if Microsoft had bought AOL before Netscape came out and if they had the vision to take the AOL platform — ad delivery network, search, IM, forums, the browser, and use it as a front end to the rest of the Internet?
People were actually paying AOL for all this stuff. It could have become a commercially viable delivery platform for all of Microsoft content, and maybe they wouldn’t have been passed by Yahoo, Google and Facebook. After all, a lot of what Facebook has, AOL had in nascent form 15 years ago.
Maybe Microsoft wants to get ahead of the technology curve for once, instead of following along far behind. The only way it was able to dominate the browser market was by shipping it with every copy of Windows. But for the rest of the Web innovation, Microsoft had no hardware advantage, and suffered every step of the way. It lost the online apps race. It lost the search engine race. It lost the portal race. It lost the e-commerce race. Now it’s also losing the mobile race.
Maybe the company learned from its mistakes.
Or maybe, if they buy Second Life, they will treat it as just what it is – a social virtual world, bundle it with their other offerings, and totally miss the opportunity.
Or – and this is really visionary — they will take some of the expertise in SL, combine that with their UI and 3D technology, and come out with a 3D operating system-virtual world browser combo and beat Apple to the punch.
Nah, that’ll never happen.
– Maria
Just curious – what makes so many people believe that Linden Lab is profitable? or that it ever was? According to Catherine Smith, their Marketing Director at that time, it wasn’t profitable even in March (and since that things went much worse as we know). Read this interview http://news.cnet.com/2100-1043_3-6054598.html notice
” For now, the company isn’t profitable, and it’s not clear when it will be, said Catherine Smith, Linden Lab’s director of marketing. However, she told CNET News.com that Linden Lab plans to use its new funding for aggressive international expansion, as well as for hiring intended to boost its infrastructure.”
I think Jeremy touched on something in regards to patents. Microsoft, or other corporations, may have an interest in what LL owns, not its product.
Buying LL just to shut it down? Microsoft needs to show themselves that the money they’d make selling the physical assets or similar actions is still more than the debt they would be buying with LL. I’ve not seen anywhere that puts LL in the black just yet.
Unfortunately, if this rumor is true, and if MS does buy, my guess is they will act like lemmings and follow the other VW’s off the cliff and demand that everything in Second Life be PG.
@Maria
The 3D web? Microsoft is split across two avenues when it comes to that: Silverlight and WebGL. The former of which with no real 3D capabilities right now in that it can’t run send instructions directly to the GPU with shader languages, and the latter is a spec IE9 isn’t going to support. If Microsoft is planning to pursue something ambitious like turning IE10 into a WebGL compliant browser that uses secondlife:// as a connectable protocol that renders 3D graphics in the browser, that’d make sense I suppose, but that’d be more about seeing a future in WebGL than anything else.
As for any technical advantages to buying Linden Lab, when you take Second Life out of its silo, there is absolutely nothing about it technically advanced or ahead of what Microsoft is doing and has long since done.
For example, Second Life’s server-infrastructure is just a bunch of Intel servers running one sim per core backed with MySQL databases if highscalability.com is to be believed. What could Microsoft benefit from that? It doesn’t demonstrate anything greater than Windows Azure, or even a client product like Eve Online which is backed by Windows HTC and SQL Server tech to power a similar amount of concurrent users in a single ‘server’.
It’s in above areas like that Second Life itself stands to benefit; if the sims could become cloud hosted and land owners priced more akin to what you’d expect from, essentially, web hosting providers nowadays. Not to mention Microsoft is next to none albeit probably not preferably to the Mono team itself in getting the Mono implementation up to shape and improving scripting in world.
Without Microsoft though, there’s nothing Second Life is ‘ahead’ in really unless one assumes it never needs to be in the browser, and that in the browser WebGL, Flash and Silverlight aren’t going to be the three major embedded clients. With Microsoft though, the idea of 3D in the browser via a proprietary product like Silverlight or a HTML5 spec like WebGL seems viable, provided Microsoft sees a future in 3D in a browser for some reason.
what’s the real gossip….You know support staff?We’re all dying to know who’s replacing the ontynes, when the ontynes are gone, will we ever see lindens on support again and if support hours will be back to their usual!
Microsoft? They’d go for open sim or a pretty like Blue Mars
@White Linden Lab certainly was profitable. Indeed, hugely profitable apparently. Quite when that profitability started to slide into the red is debatable. Sometime in the latter part of 2009, I should think. Given all the cuts and so forth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Linden Lab was profitable again as of roughly tomorrow, now that the UK staff are gone.
White Lebed — the CNET story about unprofitability is from 2006. Things changed quite a bit since then. — Maria
The quickest way to sink a possible acquisition is by talking about it.
Perhaps there are folks at LL who don’t WANT to be acquired by u$.
My money was on Google for some years now. I still think the SL grid on the Google worldwide infrastructure would be a killer.
Way back in April I blogged (http://poultryreport.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-google-needs-to-buy-linden-lab.html) about why I thought Google should buy The Lab and still believe the “Do No Evil” crowd should do it. With Skype’s inevitable tie-in to Facebook, Twitter’s leap past MySpace in volume, and other social media shifts, adding SL could help Google’s heretofore failed attempts to enter the market. Imagine a Second Life channel on GoogleTV? I can see it.
Google would make more sense than Microsoft in a lot of ways, in other ways not so much. There’s been the shortlived Google Lively, and the Chrome experiments with the O3D plugin. Now they’re behind the WebGL spec, but still may be eyeing the idea of a virtual world web.
There’s also been rumors all year of ‘Google Games’, but that’s mostly been rooted in their investment into Zynga recently. But, Google’s made some other related interesting acquisitions and investments, they bought the company that owns SocialGold which allows for cross-world virtual currency.
Many other things to consider, like Second Life’s adoption of Google Appliance for search, their webmap API, all things that hint at a billing relationship already at least.
Who knows, I just hope the rumor is true in any capacity because Linden Lab seems like it could use a big infusion of morale and cash.
The potential benefits to Google from a purchase such as SL are a good reason that Microsoft might be interested, I would think. As mentioned by others, it would potentially be a strategic move, to keep the competition, Google, from getting hold of it.
Linden Lab has responded, and declined to confirm or deny. I’ll add that to the post.
I take that as a yes. At least that they’re in discussion.
I am very worried now… using Linux.
(((
Usually those corporate “no comments” are rooted in internal policy. Is it typical of Linden Lab not to respond, as in its a known policy when it comes to rumors, or just the chosen stance at this time?
Agreed.. no answer is an answer. It doesn’t have to mean they were purchased though, just that they are open to selling/talks.
[...] Linden Lab entertaining offers Zitat: [...]
LL buys Avatars United and runs it a while before closing it down..
Now Microsoft MIGHT be purchasing SL to run it while…
Nahhhhhhh, Couldn’t be happening again!
@Ezra Every time that I can recall the Lab giving me this particular response to “rumours” in the past, the rumours turned out to be correct. Normally, I consider it ‘a tell’ and confirmation. Every time the rumours weren’t true (or not entirely true), I got some form of denial or partial denial.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that this is a tell this time, though.
Rumors are always a problem for PR departments. On the one hand, you always want to deny the bad rumors right away, before people start to believe them. “Is it true that your product causes cancer and impotence and helps fund terrorist groups?” — “No, that is completely unfounded!”
But if you deny every rumor that’s false, then people start assuming than whenever you DON’T deny a rumor, that it must be true. At some point, a company has to stop and say, this particular rumor doesn’t particularly hurt us or help us, so we can ignore it. The Microsoft rumor isn’t particularly going to hurt Linden Lab — it might even inspire interest from other potential investors if the company is, in fact, looking for an exit — so there’s no particular benefit to denying it. And, of course, you can’t confirm if if you’re still in negotiations and things haven’t been finalized yet.
So all in all, I’d say it’s a wash.
- Maria
Quick, somebody wake Google up and get them to make a higher bid.
This has something to do with Noam Chomsky coming to SL right?
http://regentestatessl.com/wordpress/?p=91
Jack said in his office hour it’s rumour…
Did anyone ask why Lab staff started it then?
Well .. They could have picked a better company to feign interest. MS have a great reputation for doing what LL just did to AV united.
Linden confidence crash.
Which lab staff started them? The only other site I’ve seen that has reported about these rumors used Tizzers’ twitter feed as a source. What next, do we start calling up the government to ask if that homeless guy on the streetcorner was right about aliens taking over the world?
I strongly suspect that their “no comment” meant “you’ve got to be [expletive] us, right?”
Besides, now is when it makes the least sense for LL to sell the company, not when they’re gearing up for several new release cycles (mesh, Kelly’s Crazy Plan server rollouts, Snowstorm development plans, display names, teens on the grid). Everything they’re doing, including Philip coming back, strongly points towards focusing on adding new features to the platform, not stabilizing it for sale.
I think the rumor started with a tweet from Tizzers Foxchase. I think Tizzers is a great guy and all, but he’s definitely not a reliable source. After all, LL did nuke his development company and customer base in SL without warning (since all we have on the situation is conspiracy theories, one theory is that the Woodbury ban could have been a move to crush Tizzers’s company for personal reasons).
LL not confirming or denying it means nothing. LL is full of idiots who are too scared to do anything but political infighting behind the curtain, so it’s no surprise that they can’t say anything.
@bubblesort:
Tateru had said in IM to me that they had a source that was not Tizzers. I imagine Tizzers heard it from the same source.
@Jahar
“No comment” for the sake of sarcasm doesn’t make much sense. If this is a rumor, it needs to be squashed immediately. This isn’t a private company that’s unfettered by rumor mills, its lifeblood is a microeconomy that we’ve already seen a swing wildly in a days time on the Lindex already this year when the layoffs occurred.
And I’m not too sure about now being the time it makes the ‘least sense’ to seek a buyer. They’re in a transitional period with an interim CEO, not too many more layoffs can occur before they’re in hiring mode again so the headcount should only go up from here after awhile, they’ve tightened their market segment by shedding the Enterprise platform and teen grid, and likewise shed Avatars United which leaves them with one performing web entity really; Second Life itself.
It seems like now is the best time in recent years Linden Lab would consider such.
I’m guessing today the rumor will be dealt with at some point because its spread far outside of the virtual world blogosphere. Like aforementioned, such rumors accompanied with silence can have an unknown effect on the SL economy if allowed to persist long enough.
Though I fully agree with Maria, the notion that this even might be true troubles me even though I use a Windows box.
Since when is MS interested in supporting adult content?
@Ezra
Yes, and while rumors like this are good for making the investors and management feel good, they can have the opposite effect on the customers.
Microsoft do not have a good reputation when it comes to running communities, it wasn’t till this year that you could have the word gay in your xbox live profile – even going to far as to ban a user called RichardGaywood (real name). This is a huge mismatch with many SL communities where gay is often just the tame tip of the iceberg.
Curious and curiouser
It would certainly explain:
1) The drop of so many employees, specially the good developers. Microsoft has most of the best developers in the world — second only to Google.
2) The focus on the residential market. Not even Microsoft would be able to push Second Life as an Enterprise product. But they’re growing well on the residential market: their PC games division and the Xbox division might not be profitable, but, overall, only two divisions at M$ are profitable: Windows and Office.
3) The drop of Avatars United. Microsoft already owns a large share of the social web-based tools… Facebook. Live.com is almost Dead.com compared with Facebook… so… that would explain why Microsoft developers did try to make authentication to OpenSim possible using Live IDs, and the change to Display Names would also make sense.
4) LL surprisingly moved away from IBM and Intel (which, in turn, started focusing way more aggressively on OpenSim instead), and from the effort of moving towards an interconnected grid… which didn’t make absolutely no sense at all. Unless, of course, they had started “romancing” Microsoft…
5) Microsoft might be interested in using its Bing search technology and its own ad system to replace Google as the 3D content search engine, and place ads/classifieds in SL, like they did on Facebook — which allegedly is giving them a return of 1 US$ billion annually (no, that still won’t make Facebook profitable, I’m afraid).
So there might be something about it.
What doesn’t make much sense…
1) Microsoft continues to invest on OpenSim. They’ve got some presence on grids like Reaction Grid.
2) LL’s technology (except for the viewer) is all hard-core Unix and open source-based. There is no way it can all be ported to Windows; and even subtly introducing closed-source, licensed libraries back into the viewer would skyrocket the costs of distributing the viewer, which would have to be supported by the residents… or by Microsoft. LL’s revenues wouldn’t cover that! By contrast, OpenSim is all written in C# and runs as well under .NET as under Mono (some say it runs even better under .NET), which would make it far more attractive to Microsoft developers than LL’s own code.
3) The “radical technology” that Linden Lab developed for SL — 3D content streaming — is being phased out by HTTP transfers. So Microsoft wouldn’t even be able to patent that technology: it’s not used by anyone else, and not even LL is sticking to it. There is really no “radical new technology” in SL — it’s just the overall product that is innovative, and, of course, the virtual world itself (its society and economy) is very valuable.
4) Why would MS be interested in selling ads to a million or so users when they have half a billion in Facebook?
So, I don’t know…
Well, it makes sense that Rosedale would be *speaking* to executives from Microsoft, presumably he knows them from way back. Remember that RealNetworks is based in Seattle and had a close relationship with u$ back around when Rosedale was RN’s VP & CTO … that would be 1996-1999. In 1999 he left to start LL.
Perhaps some employees knew that LL is open to offers, saw Ballmer or somebody stop by, and panicked? Two companies can flirt (oh, sorry, explore synergies) without M&A taking place.
@Gwyneth: The conventional wisdom in OS seems to be that OS is more stable on .NET, but region crossings are better on linux. I’ve only ever run it on .NET before, though, so I don’t personally know.
@Resi:
Where in his office hour does he deny it? He just said, “these rumors happen all the time”. That’s not a denial, just a statement of history.
@Axi: “Since when is MS interested in supporting adult content?”
Internet Explorer accesses adult content on the web. Windows support adult content. DirectX allows high-res graphics of adult content. Second Life is the same – it’s a platform; it can be used for whatever.
@Gwyn: “What doesn’t make much sense…”
OpenSim: Shopping around, checking out competition, perhaps using OpenSim enough to say, “I think we want the BIG SDK called Second Life, not just the small SDK of OpenSim.
LL’s technology: Oracle bought Sun.
Lack of patentable tech: Oh, I imagine Microsoft will figure out a bunch of software method things to patent.
Ads: I don’t think it’s about selling ads. I bet it’s about integrating the 3-D world into XBox Live, or integrating the 3-D simulation stuff into LiveMeeting / etc – which really is absent from radical changes for years.
I hope nor Microsoft nor Apple wins, i’m not quite sure about Google either…
@secondtense.com/
The subtle difference with looking at porn using IE and porn using SL, is that the provider of the browser isn’t also the isp hosting the porn in both cases.
I guess people don’t remember how Microsoft singlehandedly torpedoed VRML by polluting the WWW Consortium’s HTML standards by introducing illegal “extensions” in its efforts to sabotage and destroy Netscape.Or how they took The Palace and ran it into the ground to get rid of competition. Or a thousand other such moves.
We’d be a whole lot farther along towards the true 3D multiverse if Darth Ballmer hadn’t swooped in. Don’t look to M$ to save your grid. Believe me, I was there then.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if MS bought SL in order to kill it… but if they buy it and don’t kill it, I expect it will immediately be made Windows/XBox only. In either case, see you all on OpenSim.
SL is “unkillable”. Or rather, the IDEA of SL is unkillable. Even if someone like MS or Sony or whoever buys SL to bury it, users will flock in masses to OSGrid, Inworldz or any other of the top 3rd party grids. It will give these an immense boost. It is probably the wakeup call everybody needs.
The idea of SL is in the world. It can’t be killed. Any attempt to kill it will make it stronger.
@Peter I seem to recall saying something very similar myself.
Must have missed that one, but it is dead-on.
Somehow, I find myself thinking that buying-for-killing is probably the best that could happen.
Maybe time to look at the Open Metaverse Currency again? ( https://www.virwox.com/omc-open-metaverse-currency.php?language=en )
Why would Microsoft want to buy SL when Open Simulator could be as good,(physics would not be a problem as MS owns “Havoc”) if not better with a comparatively small amount of monetary investment?
The license in OS allows the code to be used for closed commercial grids of which there are a few already.
If a takeover was in the offing, it would only make sense as a way to gain a ready made user base as a starting point for a merger of virtual world technologies in an effort to drive mass adoption.
Hypergrid in SL perhaps?
Two Labbers contacted me privately today, and have told me that the basic story is correct as far as they know. Someone made an offer, but neither of them believe that it was actually Microsoft that was the company behind it. One said that the offer was far too low and rejected, and that there is no sign that it is going forward.
[...] for the massive acquisitions that happen unseen behind boardroom doors. Yesterday, Tateru Nino posted a rumor on her blog that several Linden Lab employees were saying that Microsoft was making a bid to purchase the [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mitch Wagner, Daniel Voyager, Zauber Paracelsus, Zauber Paracelsus, Ron Blechner and others. Ron Blechner said: Linden Lab's buyout offer real, but not from Microsoft: From @TateruNino http://j.mp/dsyekC [...]
oh you are soooo wrong – this is 100% Tizzer (what a brilliant “journalist*). that crazy Tizzer *rolls eyes*
well companies are bought and sold everyday. residents have their heads in the sand (or up their butt) if they don’t think this is a possibility
[...] Lab. I was pointed towards the rumours when a friend asked me if I’d seen Tateru Nino’s personal blog post on the matter; I held off commenting, because on the one hand, the idea really did seem absurd [...]
Whatever direction this take is going to be very interesting, on one side you have LL investors that perceive they are sitting on a pot of gold (or want you to believe they are). On the other you have potential buyers that look at it as not worth the money and effort. Then you have the content creators, people like you and me who are about to get screwed when their paychecks stop coming because they were so one sided and didn’t look for other avenues of income when they had the chance.
To the SL name brand owners that don’t get it… Where are you going to go if your beloved SL funks up? How are you going to make that next RL house payment? Where are you going to export your product too? I don’t know of any other environment that you can go to other then OpenSim. Think about it, LL plays this game for their profit not for yours.
And at all, the the done (and coming) staff and support layoffs are probably a clear sign that LL is actively trying to sell. Seems to be just a matter of time.
This is how I look at it. MS has never bought a company to fix it. Their goals are usually to dismantle, take the prime assets and repurpose them for an existing or future project. The SL avatar – though not prefect ( wacky side seams) are still one of the most sophisticated avies out there with a HUGE collection of designer dudes to match. Their 3D eyeballs are what give them their sense of presence, just for the simple fact they have some of the best eye tracking technology out there -beats all the MMO dolls that use a drawn blink and when open, their eyes look like zombies.
LL maybe have stopped using the words IP RIGHTS where user content is concerned, but in their description of their usage rights of anything that comes into their grid, they give themselves the equivalent of IP rights. If you doubt this, just check out the TOS and the TPV TOS.
What’s that add up to? Could it be a MS version of Sony’s HOME running on the Xbox? Might be interesting to see exactly how Sony’s VW has been doing over the last year or so. Then you throw in the problem of the SL platform. For all intent and purpose its a bit crispy and charred on the edges. Sure, Phillippe sent the client out to the world, hoping to get help to fix it form the open source community. But he neglected to instruct them that it needed to stay compatible with all the content currently active on the ground. That means that while opensim has made incredible strides its clearly not possible to just swap out the OS system with LL’s platform. By the scripts alone it would cause at least 20% of them to stop running – maybe more.
So what do you do with a platform that is hopelessly trapped, and a user base that is madly vocal, and a budget that is insupportable by revenues? You sell, pay off as much debt as possible and call it a day I think. If that’s the case, no matter who the potential buyer is,one has to wonder if they really do view us as an asset. There are good arguments to suggest that maybe all these bad decisions that caused people to leave wasn’t unintentional. Maybe they wanted to reduce the legal risk by making it harder and harder to find value in staying for almost ever segment of the community.
In the end I’m finishing up backing up my things and checking out other viable grids. Inworldz was mentioned and its fine when you’re on your own island, but pretty crashy at the entry point, but that could be because they’ve got a good number of people there that tend to hang out at the drop in zone. OSGrid is kinda known not to be too kind to creators who want to make revenues from their work, but they do offer the latest and greatest in Opensim and its said they have like 10K users. ReactionGrid is great too, but more concentrated on educational and business entities, The French grid, New World has been quietly existing for years. Its refreshing to see such a solid community. Then there is spoton that is said to be super stable and secure for companies and education, but they just opened in June so don’t have a lot of users yet – something like 40 or 50 after opening a month or so ago. Then there are the older player oriented and ran ones like Open life, avatar hangout and meta7 that have had some good things and not so good thing said about them. In the end the users have to make up their own minds.
Lots of choices, but got to remember to check out the companies behind them. Anyone can say they area real company. I’d personally never buy land from a grid that couldn’t or wouldn’t prove they were on the up and up legally.
There is a bit of sunshine in all this for the creators. if this is true it will create a ton of need for full perm clothing and content for people to move over with. If the creators were smart they’d start selling moving bundles of their old stuff for people and make some money from that old content. In opensim grids it’d be wildly popular.
What about ProtoSphere being built on the Microsoft Stack, and supporting SharePoint and Microsoft Lync Server. Don’t they already have one virtual world.
Or, is it that SL has a lot of ideas that fuel the future of Virtual Worlds, and Microsoft can’t think of any new ideas around where to take the consumer, the content user-generator, or a community of loyalists who are there because the software serves them and not the other way around.
Rumors from one company fueling lots of jabber about the rumor sounds like someone needs media attention.
Round Two: Ballmer and Jobs in bitter dispute over SL acquisition. Doesn’t SL favor QuickTime? Or is it Adobe in embattled fight with Microsoft over Flash and Silverlight. It’s funny, I never see Apple or or Adobe ever shutting down their brilliant attempts to define the software market. Microsoft’s real story is they can’t get their stock to move after five years, that’s a much bigger story rather than they’re going to pick on Rosedale – a brilliant innovator. I haven’t seen any innovation out of Microsoft for so long, I’m wondering if we ever will again. Acquisition is not innovative, Cisco is better at acquisition than Microsoft.
Virtual Worlds are innovative because they turn ideas into money. Microsoft – the 3D Internet is here — or do you think that’s a passing fancy too? Let’s get some youth in Microsoft leadership, so we can help support one of the best software companies in the world into the 21st century. Not gossip over tiny, tiny ideas.
If we get real announcements, real media companies making decisive, clear statements about what is happening with Linden Labs OR Microsoft, then we can start making some bets. But, here we go again with rumors and blah, blah blogging.
[...] happened, and that both companies are just stalling their joint announcement). Both Microsoft and Linden Lab have declined to confirm or deny the [...]