The slrevolution corporate – enterprise ideas
This is a response to the latest post on thslrevolution blog regarding some advices Valiant Westland is making towards a more “competitive” SL in the middle of the whole virtual worlds market. His first idea was an incredible and blatant rant against opensource, clearly without any kind of ideea that even the wordpress he is using is opensource. Dear mr Westland, I suggest you to get you head stuck out of the windows centric world. The first argument: after the SL client was opensource allowing every user with enough skills to understand what is going on to commit changes in the main trunks the SL client progressed in every way, not because LL didnt had enough programers but because they were simply out missing the scenery. When the client was opensourced a majority of fixes, improvement stability issues and don’t forget features users were always requesting found their way in the client. So before your rant you should be aware that there is only ONE trunk and different compilers for different platforms. That allows us, the opensource crowd to help your XP client be more stable, faster and with more features. So the competitive suicide you are talking about is nothing else but a try to make it better, yes through opensource. How much the SL client progressed after its openourcing, how many users were able to compile their own patches in their clients and make it available to the world ? Read here in the wiki more and you maybe will understand.
I don’t even want to know how better are going to be developed the simulator software in a opensourced model.
But, let’s go further and talk about inworld messaging. The actual inworld messaging is based on SMTP and using yes opensource servers. What mr Westland is talking is a pure another ideea form his windows centric world called Exchange. I am asking other exchange advanced users around, how many times did it crashed, how many times did you missed the simplicity of a postfix 15 minutes implementation and yes how many months took to implement exchange and first how much the implementation of that impacted the users and their busineses. We are not talking about the money cause exchange is advertised to be free, FOR those who are purchasing a coporate licencing. Or wait this is not corporate because the clients are suposed to be outsiders of LL that is going to add another 75 usd to the membership and ban free users to use it once again.
What about real document creation, am I missing the point or this is a virtual world ? Am i missing the fact that this SL client is not a Word? Do we need to have text manipulation tools in SL. The big corporations using SL are using separate application for that. I suggest simply using Openoffice and Gimp. Which are by the way programs used by the bigest lingerie producer in SL yes, Insolence.
Community calendars, the vast majority of the modeling agencies I am part of are already using google docs for sharing info and dates.
Robust presence, aren’t we loosing steam ? Yes I know! The presence server is a long discussed issue in SL developing and jira communities. With the opensourcing of that things are going to go better. The main issue seems to be the outsourcing of the databases behind the LL servers.
SMS and email integration, let’s look around ? How many of the users are wanting to be brought out of their beds to answer a customer support issues sent to their blackberries in the middle of the night just because in the other half of the world is daytime.
Mesh content support, that is not going to happen. Just use sculpties as everybody else is.
The conclusion is that the post is a meaningless rant over some features that a small group might be using.
The secret is an enterprise will not ever want to use SL for business purposes if they are not in the possibility of controlling at least the simulator software and the connection to the main grid. Any IT team will deny without a real control. To outsource a SIM to LL is expensive. Instead of the LL should have to open up the grid to new connections. I can host at any time simulator servers in one of my datacenters at half the cost of LL does it already, and I dont have to be sensitive to Amazonaws issues.
I have to say that I really like theslrevolution posts, they are raising real and interesting issues so yes I am little bit disapointed because of the latest post.
Mr. Thomsen, Let me first congratulate you on taking the time to offer a solid rebuttal of my original post. I enjoyed reading your perspective.
My comments about Open Source are purely market driven. You will notice my comments singled out “Fat Client / Client Server, Open Source Business Productivity or MMOG application”s as non-starters, not the inherently more nimble and easy to deploy web apps, such as WordPress.
You may be surprised to know I actually use and appreciate Firefox and am thrilled to hear the Open Source Mozilla Graphics Group is working on improving the admittedly slow graphics engine so that it can handle the demands of Virtual Worlds.
I think you misconstrued my comment about in-world messaging. I’m not advocating Exchange, although another well known SL designer I was speaking with yesterday, whose background is also in IT, compared SL to Lotus Notes. What I am suggesting is that in-world messaging allow for rich content. Forcing me to open an attachment and clumsily cut and paste content, including URLs to take further action on the information is NOT a solution. Whatever back-end platform this functionality comes from, it needs to improve!
I respectfully suggest, in answer to your question about “missing the point;” yes, I think you are “missing the point” regarding document creation and collaboration. It will be interesting to talk to the folks at Insolence and ask them if it would be more efficient for them to be able to open, create and share one of their Google Docs in a in-world window. I might even ask what they think about having a virtual filing cabinet, that provides them with an easy in-world metaphor for storing them!
As for calendars. Once again, the fact that “the vast majority of the modeling agencies (you are) part of are already using google docs for sharing info and dates.” is a clear sign that this type of functionality needs to be integrated in-world. Notice I use the word integration, NOT replacement. I actually use Google Calendar and the mechanizedLIFE CalendarCog ( http://www.mechanizedlife.com/calendarcog-hud-documentation/ ) product to provide me with basic Google Calendar access in-world. Once again, I wonder of those same fashion designers would find it useful to have us be able to add a fashion show to our calendars with a single click and then reminded to attend, wherever we happen to be?
As for SMS and email integration and it disturbing our sleep… The point is to have tools that allow us to route and control the flow of information, not isolate us from it. In my current Small Business (IRS definition < 20MM) I have voice mail, email and fax services in the cloud. I manage all of them from my laptop, with all message types routed to my smart phone, depending on their priority, time of day and who they are from.
Your comment about mesh support puzzles me. You totally ignore my point about the tremendous volume of content and the corresponding investments that already exists in CAD programs. A sole proprietor graphic artist, working from their home office, might not need mesh support, but anyone who wants to bridge the gap between virtual modeling/prototyping and “Real World” application is going to insist their virtual platform provide it.
My conclusion is that your post is NOT “meaningless” or a “rant,” as you have suggested mine is. Rather we both perceive what is important, based on our own paradigm.
You may be correct, when you say that thousands of your fellow SL users don’t need or want the features/improvements I’ve suggested. My perspective and the point of my post, is based on my understanding of what matters to hundreds of millions of business software users in the real world, many of whom are looking for ways to use VW technology for enhanced collaboration, training, prototyping and demonstration.
To be fair to both of us, I’m going to talk with some associates about conducting a survey, that asks current and prospective SL business users about features they would like to have access to in the SL client itself. Would you would agree to publish a link to the survey in your blog and also post the results?
Valiant Westland
April 1, 2009 at 8:38 am