New CEO Mark Kingdon alias „M Linden“ – soon new CTO?

Founder Philip Rosedale has announced today that after about one month the search for a new CEO is over – it is going to be Mark Kingdon, in world name M Linden.

He’s going to start May 15th, has a background in arts, business and economics and has been working at bigger companies. His main focus? Better in world stability, user experience and reliability. He’s also got quite much experience in international companies, which might help Lindenlab too, since they have an international audience.

Sounds like very good news to me, seems it’s easier for Lindenlab to find a new CEO than a new CTO, though, but perhaps since this one is settled a new CTO will follow shortly…

A more in depth portrait of Mark Kingdon can be found here.


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Riding the wave or getting lost under it

In business, like almost everywhere else, it’s either riding the wave or getting lost when it waves above you. Making a revolution or suffering a revolution.

Lindenlab for long has been riding the wave. Now, that the hype has somewhat gone, it needs to establish Second Life as a more stable platform than it is today, because the competition like OpenSim is catching up and up more and getting stronger. It still has its advantages above other platforms, but needs to communicate those more.

In her latest long essay long running citizen Gwyneth Llewelyn asks about if bad communication practice is the root of all evil, let’s just say for short, she’s got some valid points. Communication has flown to other kind of meanings, it’s still there, but needs to be polished up.

Another main problem she’s raising is Lindenlab’s missing to produce a roadmap and their inability to work out and work on timelines. That’s quite serious stuff.

One of the main problems with SL today is that it doesn’t really scale very well. This problem has already been known about the last two years and shows up everyday more and more when a certain avatar threshold of concurrent logins has been met.

The technic behind Second Life has some bottlenecks and shortcomings. Think about it as an analogy like a Ferrari powered by a lawn mower engine. Looks good and all shiny, but cannot deliver the promised power. Yuck.

What Lindenlab has got to do is to build a new engine, that’s hard enough, but also to put it in the car while it’s running, and that’s quite a hard feature to achieve. We’ll see if it ever happens or not.


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Login worries

Some days ago there’s been the news that IBM is going to build their own server farm with the Second Life server side on it.

Well, frankly said, I can understand them. That convoluted mess that Second Life today is is all but a worthwile investment if you’re a company. If you want to have a good experience with it, better stay away from the main grid and build your own farm, your own island.

If you’re thinking about investing in SL, better do it when the grid has more stabilized. At the moment this would just be a great waste of money in my opinion given the bad performance all inhabitants of Second Life have been experiencing since months now.


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Nicholaz Beresford quits making his browser

Nichlaz Beresford, a resident well known for his own sat of patches for the official browser, quitted some days ago very frustrated providing them.

Many residents mourn about the loss of this talented programmer and his browser, because for many people his browser gave far more better gaming experience, meaning mostly stability and speed, to Second Life than the official does for them. His work has been well appreciated in the community which used his browsers.

The reasons listed by him for quitting making a better browser are mainly:

  • he wanted to create his own vision of browser, but has been unable to do so since he was mainly busy ironing out bug after bug after bug,
  • the Lindens don’t really care for bug fixes coming from third parties any more, most times they just plainly ignore them and
  • considering the bad state the browser and platform is in now he would have start all over again.

So, the community loses a quite talented programmer who probably would have been a very good bug hunter and much, much more. That’s sad.

By the way, there’s still no new CTO at Lindenlab, so it seems. Wonder how they manage to run so long without someone leading the techies.


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