Interview with Linden Lab's Ginsu Yoon

going to do this, all of these other great companies are going to do this." And you know, I am sure some of them will, as Google already has. But it's not like they're going to open it up, pull the switch, and it works. This stuff is hard. I think people assume that it's fairly trivial and Linden Lab keeps making mistakes and footfalls just because we don't know how to do this.

I guess the most humble way that I can say this, is nobody knows how to do this. These are things that while a lot of them are similar to many other online experiences, you know, doing the package of things that we are trying to do, there's no known formula for success. If there was, we would have done it! It's not like people don't understand how to follow a formula for success. There isn't one, and Google didn't hit it. They'll keep mixing at it, if they want to, they'll continue to focus, continue to get better and we hope we do too.

Industry Standard: What criticism of Second Life and Linden Lab do you think is getting a bit tired or unfair? It could be internally, or from external sources.

Yoon: I have a hard time calling something unfair. Because again, I am honestly grateful that we're the target of so much intention and criticism. But it is the case that in the grand scheme of online experiences, we're still very new, very small, very early adopters. But we get a disproportionate amount of intention. We have to be grateful about that, quite honestly, because it puts many more eyes on a number of problems, and while at times that's painful, it does (muddled) to problems as soon as is humanly possible.

I guess the thing that I do, it does make me unhappy, where these sorts of criticisms come from, the assumption that we just don't care, or we don't want to make things better. We are intentionally trying to hurt people, to hurt users, to hurt our customers.

Obviously, that kind of criticism can and should be ignored, but still it's hard to believe that that's a rational criticism of any company. Companies don't exist to do that to their own customers. They don't exist to make people unhappy, at least companies that want to be successful. So that does affect those of us, especially those who hear a lot of user input. But again, you have to be grateful for it, you have to take it and try to improve. It is a competitive advantage, right? Honestly. Because people don't end up bringing that kind of passion to other kinds of products and services.

Industry Standard: If I were to come back to you and have this conversation one year from now and ask about Second Life, and what has worked well, and ideally, what would you want to be able to show me in terms of the interface, in terms of the enterprise push, in terms of some of the other development, in terms of the user base? Ideally, what would that look like?

Yoon: I would be pretty disappointed if we didn't have the basics that we talked about satisfying enterprise market needs, right? Again, these aren't unknown, these are not complicated. We do mange our development efforts toward the market demand, and we believe there is good market demand. But this is a certainly a very uncertain time in our economy. But you know, that's sort of like the baseline. But if I haven't hit those things by this time next year, I probably won't be here. You'll probably be interviewing someone else (chuckles). It's so basic, we have to hit those.

In terms of the availability, the stability, the performance. Those are things where there a huge number of metrics. It's hard to