Interview with Linden Lab's Ginsu Yoon

rather than my personal credit card!" But that's not the stuff that you really write about. But the way I look at it is there is just this whole set of things, we know what they are and we just have to knock them down. I get excited when we knock any one of them down. I don't really care what it is. But none of them are like, "oh, there's going to be an imaginary flame thrower for enterprise users." It's pretty straightforward, actually.

To be honest, that is again returning to my enterprise roots. It's kind of good to know this range of things that are very specific customer-driven requirements, that you know if satisfy those things, if your offering is productive enough, then you really have a shot at making customer sales.

It's kind of nice feeling, and it's very different from the feeling of a mass consumer play, where there's a lot that you won't know, a lot that you can't know, whether it will catch on fire. No individual consumer knows. There's so much that just goes on that's out in the zeitgeist.

There's something incredibly engaging and exciting about being on that side of the business too, and I am also on that side of the business. But if you ask me what's sort of different and new in the enterprise space, part of the reason it's interesting is because you know what you have to do.

Industry Standard: Comparing Second Life as it appeals to early adopters vs. consumers, compared to people who are coming in on the enterprise side, what needs to make it so it's more for them? Just from the user perspective. Like an office worker who is told by her manager, 'we're having a meeting in Second Life. We're going to do something in there.'

Yoon: A lot of things are the same. Our basic issues about the stability and scalability and the performance of the system. That's item no. 1 for both the consumer and the enterprise perspective. That's really why so much of the common underpinning of our technology and the development of our workforce is deployed in those areas.

So, outside of those basics? The next thing that is very big and very common across any user group is to improve the usability of the system, just in terms of the ease of adoption, the fit to a broader base of user configurations on the terminal end. You know, you want more people to be able to run Second Life on their computers and have a shorter period of training or adoption, and learning time, to be able to become a more devoted user.

Again, same thing. Those two things, just two, but there's a million subtexts in those things, those two things are by far the overwhelming bulk of this company's work right now. Then, where it does start to diverge? It's about having the kind of account management and billing systems, customer support, documentation, you know those departments are different for a consumer and an enterprise. But that's pretty much a layer at the top.

Industry Standard: For the second point that you brought up, ease of use, what is this company doing to change that or make it better?

Yoon: I think that there are things that we can do to make it better, in terms of the user experience. Ad that has to do with the user interface, that has to do with the experience that you first have when you log in, that is more directed toward what you are interested in when you first found out about Second Life. So imagine that interest in that first user experience? It's actually quite a difficult task. We've been trying to do it for years, but I think we have some better ideas about how to do