Life

"Listen with an open mind, but don't try to remember this stuff. There's no quiz at the end." Jack Kornfield







Thursday, June 30, 2011

Does Rod Humble "get" the Secondlife Culture? I think so...

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Rod Humble.
Can he turn Secondlife around?
I don't mean financially, both he and Linden Lab tell us that Secondlife is currently both financially stable as well as profitable.
In these last few days I've been reading some of Inara Peys blog posts. She has brought forward a couple of interviews conducted recently with Mr. Humble.
In the interest of a bit of bevity let me just drop in the URLs here:
Living in the Modem World... http://modemworld.wordpress.com/
http://modemworld.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/rodvik-talks-about-birthdays-and-second-life/
http://modemworld.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/rodvik-virtual-goods-and-lls-profitability/

The "Rodvik talks about"... is a 34 minute audio interview via Massively... worth taking 34 minutes of your time.
The last link is where he discusses Linden Lab profitability, and perhaps the monetary future.

When I ask the question, "Can he turn Secondlife around?" I don't mean financially... I mean culturally.
In very recent times we've had a CEO that seemed to believe that there was no Secondlife culture.
Not that Secondlife had no art, music, poetry, or creativity... Secondlife has all of that and yes that is culture, but that isn't "The Secondlife Culture", or it isn't for myself and a lot of others.
I suspect it's difficult if not impossible to initiate a corporate identity, a corporate culture, from the bottom up.
No matter how dedicated the receptionist or the mail room clerk... they can't influence those at the very top.
Conversely those at the top do have that power, and those recently at the top allowed, if not encouraged the rank and file below them to view us, their customers, as just a necessary evil to be dealt with as summarily as possible.
Get the money and ignore.
Part of the problem was we started going away...  we took our money and our culture with us.
I and so many others repeatedly talk about the current state of how difficult it can be for new users.
I continue to believe that leaving new people alone... dumped into and increasingly, at least verbally, hostile world is no success story.
Why not return to what worked pretty darned well for six years, work on what wasn't done as well as it could have been... the basics there were working better than what we have now.

Numbers?
10,000 new people are born every day in the USA, a country of 360 million people.
16,000 new people everyday join Secondlife... and traditionally our retention rate is around 15%.
That's not 15% that come to our world and become a part of.... that's 15% that perhaps log in a few times.

When I read what Mr. Humble says... when I listen to what he says, I sense that he "gets it".
I sense that he sees the Secondlife culture and believes in it.
I want to believe that he can turn those under him around. The key is to convince those employees that what we have in Secondlife is unprecedented and that instead of perhaps just focusing on the paycheck and time clock, embracing this Secondlife culture might well improve how they feel about their job and who knows, maybe someday improve their bank accounts.
I'm sure that on any Friday afternoon when all someone has done all darned day is struggle through lines of code looking for a killer bug or have just spent and inordinate amount of time trying to placate and unreasonable customer the last thing they're thinking of  is the Secondlife culture and what a fantastic, (and at least for me), once in a lifetime opportunity our Secondlife world can be.

I will continue to dream... and I know I'm not alone in this dream.
And so it goes
My love to you all, brinda
Namaste
नमस्ते

1 comment:

  1. Hooray! Now we all need to remember he's the new guy. He doesn't know all the history or the problems. If we can drop the accumulated frustration and anger and reapproach the problems in the light of a new openings, we all have a much better chance of making SL the kind of world we love, support and wish to continue and profit.

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