Interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon

Kingdon: Well, [they] could complement [each other]. It could a substitute. It could be a competitor. I think there's going to be some people who are more comfortable in one environment over another.

I think for widespread adoption and ease of use, Second Life is the most compelling because everyone has a PC and most everybody has a PC that is going to be equipped to run Second Life.

You don't even need a headset really. You can just listen and do text chat. If you have a headset you go into Second Life, you log into client, you can be anywhere in the, we call it business world which is going to have broadband-speed access and you are connected. Sure, there is some setup time and sure you have to learn how to use it. You may not have the perfect avatar out of the box.

It may be a little embarrassing when you are stumbling around. But once you get seated at the table and you start having a conversation it works really, really well. And I think for widespread adoption, there is really nothing else out there like it.

If you look at Web-based conferencing system, [it's] also very accessible but you don't have what feels really like human interaction. It feels very 2D.

And that's one end. At the super high-end video conference, you are going to have relatively few installations and so it is going to be a very conscious act to schedule a meeting, go to the room, have the meeting, leave and Second Life can be much more pervasive and widespread happening because anybody can use it at anytime.

Industry Standard: You said most people are equipped with a PC that can handle Second Life. There is a trend taking place now. I asked this question of Gene, as well. Net books are becoming more popular. Portable computers such as the iPhone or other smaller devices. People aren't getting desktops all the time. Actually laptops, I think for the first time ever outsold desktops in the third quarter of last year.

Kingdon: I haven't used a desktop at work or at home. Yeah. I am a laptop person.

Industry Standard: I am assuming that you have a pretty good laptop and it's a high-performance one.

Kingdon: I have a good laptop but I don't think it's necessarily … we don't make special orders. I mean it's an off-the-shelf laptop.

Industry Standard: Is it a PC or Mac?

Kingdon: It's a Mac. But, can I just answer your question, because I don't think I did.

You talked about people moving to notebooks and smaller pieces of hardware. What we are looking at for Second Life is to bring a lot more of the Web into Second Life, and to take really significant elements of the Second Life experience and put them out on the Web, so that we are in sync with the market changes in terms of the way people want to connect with and consume Second Life.
It doesn't mean we're going to put the entire Second Life experience in a browser, because there are probably elements for the foreseeable future that you can't do that with. But, there are other elements of the Second Life experience that very much lend themselves to the Web.

Industry Standard: Such as?

Kingdon: We have our land store; it's on the Web, so you can start to think of a significant e commerce experience on the Web. Profiles, if you know where to look, you can find Second Life profiles on the Web. But, we need to make that social tool much, much stronger, and it can easily be Web-based.

The same with communications. We see a lot of natural extensions of instant messaging and voice out to the Web. So, when you start to think like that, you can start to see things that can be amplified and pulled out to other places.

Industry Standard: You also mentioned that Second Life is probably the most widely adopted virtual world. Are there other competitors out there that you keep an eye on?

Kingdon: Sure, I look at the market space, and we talk about it pretty broadly all the time. I just want to stay abreast of what's happening out there. It's a pretty diverse space, as you know, when you start to think about virtual worlds and their broader definition. You can spend all of your time being concerned about individual point solutions. We like to stay abreast of what's happening.

But, what's more important to us is focusing on the things that we know we need to work on to create a better user experience. Make sure that Second Life is relevant, especially in key use cases, and the platform is stable. And that's really what grounds us.

Some companies are competition-obsessed. We're more focused on what we need to get done and how we need to move the ball forward.

Industry Standard: I read an interview where you said that Google coming into the space was validation for it, and [Yoon] used those exact same words. Now that Lively has gone away, what does that tell you about this industry?