There are no excuses anymore. If Linden Lab wants this Second Life thing to be ready for prime time, it will have to grow into adulthood.
Yet it has not. According to their latest metrics, the grid's issues in April caused the loss of 630 000 hours of resident use. Not acceptable.
Of course, Linden Lab is very good at finding excuses. They had problems with key parts with the intra-grid network, the central database, the asset storage cluster and the data center.
Excuses are always good to point out the problem, but given the ambitions of Linden Lab with Second Life, excuses are not valid. These people told the media that they want this 3D life to become a bigger thing than Google. They want SL to replace the Web. But they keep having downtime and telling us that SL is complex.
I have bad news for them: downtime is not acceptable if they still wish to replace the Web and make SL bigger than Google. Let's rub it in by comparing them with the Web search giant they cited. There is no doubt that to index billions of pages on the Web and offer all their services, Google had to set up complex algorithms, data centers and a huge physical infrastructure themselves.
Yet, when you open a Google page, login at Gmail or use one of their related services, the downtimes or slow performance periods are few and far between. I have been using Google services from the day they established a decent presence in the search market. And I never had to complain about being unable to access them. Their results and performance kept me coming back for more.
In the RL industry where I work, as in many others, it is the results-oriented people that make it big. The people who are good at explaining why they failed are left on the sidelines. Why? Because they failed. LL has to stop explaining why it fails. It has to make sure that SL just works without downtimes. This is how Google cleaned up the Web search industry. All others were failing and the Mountain View company has delivered.
Wake up, Linden Lab! Before someone pulls the rug under your feet.
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