Dorktastically Delicious

The main reason I didn’t work on this post yesterday was that I was too busy trying to savor what was left of my rezz day. Now I’ll try to make heads and tails of M’s blogpost from yesterday and the related press release.

High Level

The blog post states the following main goals:

* to improve our focus as a company on the projects that matter most to Residents
* to simplify our organizational structure and operate more efficiently
* to achieve cost savings so that we can invest in platform improvements, new products, and new lines of business.

The latter two goals make a decent amount of business sense — audit and assess the company, trim the fat, and stretch the money available. Something like what the Bob’s did at Initech. While not always fun for employees, if done correctly this kind of move is generally better for the long terms goals for any company.

The press release goes into more detail:

The company’s product and engineering divisions will be combined. The software development teams will be consolidated in North America and customer support will be reconfigured to provide more scalable services.

Support restructuring should hopefully be a welcome improvement. I’ve heard quite a few complaints and horror stories about dealing with support since the last time they reconfigured. While the original support team was great, it just coulnd’t handle the necessary volume of tickets. Apparently the original reworking wasn’t great and couldn’t handle the volume either. Let’s hope this third try is a charm.

As for the software team consolidation, that also makes decent sense. Having all your devs within 3 time zones of each other definitely helps with interoffice communication. As for merging enigeering and product teams — I’m guessing that means IT infrastructure and software (server and client) are now the same team. Which means a lot of sense considering:

First, the company aims to create a browser-based virtual world experience, eliminating the need to download software. Secondly, Linden Lab will look to extend the Second Life experience into popular social networks.

When your client is in the browser being served from the hardware and interacting with the server software — being in the same team makes decent sense.

Those Laid Off

The unfortunate part, though, is the “trimming of fat”. The press release claims30% of the company got laid off yesterday. This is supposedly the list of Lindens who were laid off yesterday.

I’m not 100% sure of the list’s accuracy, since it’s originally from March 30, 2009, but it looks like at least 40 Lindens were let go yesterday. Being laid off is almost never a happy event, and I hope everyone that last their job yesterday will find be able to find new employment soon.

My question, though, is why were those Lindens laid off.

According to Massively, the enterprise team, the Singapore office, and German country/community manager Katrin Linden were part of yesterday’s cut. That all falls in line with M’s plans. SL Enterprise solutions have generally been a failed venture and aren’t necessary if focus is returning to improving resident experience. Singapore isn’t North America, unfortunately, so the team there was let go. Losing the German manager doesn’t fit very cleanly, but I’m guessing that for some reason the European HQ in Amsterdam (which for some reason isn’t listed on their employment page) somehow made her redundant.

But not all of the names make much sense. I didn’t know of the Lindens personally and most of my knowledge of their work comes from official blog posts and JIRA. The following names (in alphabetical order) make me ask questions:

• Babbage – Babbage was supposed to fix a handful of Mono-related bugs, including an upgrade to later Mono that would fix SVC-3895. Without him on the team, what will happen to LSL-Mono, and LSL in general. Will he be replaced by devs who will work on Unity3D (basically Mono in a browser)?
• Blue – Blue, along with other Lindens who worked with the Teen Grid (Claudia, Teagan, and Mia come to mind — others probably as well) were on the list. Does this mean that the Teen Grid is going soon as well? Maybe their positions will be replaced in the upcoming support restructuring?
• Pink – the new SL Beta Marketplace was supposed to launch last night. I’m guessing that’ll come soon, but it’d seem that Pink was hired only as a freelancer/consultant then?
• Pastrami – One of the original Windlight devs, Pastrami was supposedly working on mesh import lately. Does that mean mesh import is done or on the blocks for now? Mesh import was among the list of upcoming features for this year.
• Whump – Since Whump was the OpenSimulator interoperability dev, I guess inter-grid movement is no longer even a distant goal.

What Now?

I’m on the fence about the new Linden Lab goals. Running SL in a browser as opposed to as a downloadable program is a laudable goal. Sure, AjaxLife has been around for a few years, but i’m guessing this is a full 3D viewer in the browser. If it’s possible, it would make it a lot easier to get in world from anywhere. Maybe even from an iPad or netbook. But browsers implement plugin APIs slightly different, leading to hacks and strange limitations. Which browsers will LL decide to support, and on which platforms? On the plus side though, the new Version 2.0 interface now make a lot of sense — it looks like a browser because it will eventually be in a browser.

I’m not so sure I like the focus on social networks though. It doesn’t matter to me that SL interacts with social networking tools. I can already plurk and tweet inworld. I already have a profile on secondlife.com. Facebook doesn’t want avatars, while I’m not sure I want Avatars United. So why this emphasis on integrating with social networks? It doesn’t make sense that doing so would make SL more mainstream. While the social networking space is volatile (anyone like Friendster or Myspace anymore?), what does SL bring to the table that would make the mainstream user want it? Is the new Second Life really just a Facebook clone with a 3D world on the side? That doesn’t seem right.

And what about all the goals that were on the books and seemingly aren’t anymore? Marketplace beta was due today, Server 1.40 and Havok 7 were due this summer, and mesh import was due for end of year. Are those deadlines slipping? Will they actually be completed? Viewer 2.1 alpha was relelased today, so it’d seem that project is still on track, but doesn’t say much about all of the other projects.

In the meanwhile, though, Second Life is still about the people. Linden Lab provides the glue that allows me to keep in touch with those people, but there are other mechanisms too. Day to day SL shouldn’t change that much. And if it does change enough that people find it unusable, they’ll either move to another platform or give up. Sure the next platform might not be as good as Second Life, but people will adjust in order to hang out with their friends.