“Fuck it. You’re all working on the content for us, you might as well do the client, too. Clearly, it’s not like SL players have anything better to do, and they can’t possibly do worse than us in any case.”

Then — a stable economy with a million of US$ of transactions between users every day. Oops. This starts to become difficult.

Next — attract dozens (nay, hundreds) of corporations willing to set up virtual presences on a contiguous metaverse (as opposed to running their own, tiny ones). Another big “oops”. Sure, there are dozens of tools around there allowing this sort of thing (Multiverse, with 6 months or so of being in beta, will “soon” have a few games out using the platform; it’s by far not the only one). But… how many corporations are really using it? How many companies the size of IBM have a thousand employees daily using a “metaverse platform” as part of their job functions? And, asking the question in a different way: how long will it take to attract them? (Even Microsoft is developing an island in Second Life these days; Apple is the only major “techie” company which is apparently absent without a good reason)

So, the last blow was making the client open source.

What this means is that any successful competitor will need to beat Linden Lab on all the above and do it during a timeframe while Second Life will continue its explosive growth. It seems less and less likely, even with huge and massive investments behind it — and a far sounder business model to support those long-term investments. After all, the post-dot-com VC firms are not so keen any more in having “very long-term” ROIs. A few are — Amazon, eBay, Google. Two of them are major investors in Linden Lab already :)

Does this mean that there is no room for “competition”? No. I could very much imagine Yahoo swallowing up IMVU, partner with Google, integrate SketchUp inside IMVU and put everything on Google Earth — and you’ll have a Metaverse in about a year or so (always in perpetual Beta :) ) sponsored by Google AdSense and Yahoo Adverts. Well, that could happen “overnight” and swallow up Second Life in a year or two if they released the client as open source, too.

Would they do it? I think not. A wise CEO at Yahoo and Google will simply wait a bit, assign a task force to play around with the now released source code for the client, and create a “Yahoo/Google SL-compatible client” instead. Imagine a client where the in-world search would actually work but to see the blindingly fast results of that search, you’d have to watch ads. LL never caught on that insane idea. Yahoo and Google might thing that targetting something for a 2.4 million account market (never mind how many are returning users…) will probably pay the costs of developing it :)

This article talks about Second Life VR “game” client going open source. Which is cool. However the author doesn’t know much about Open Source.
* Netscape the company failed because it couldn’t compete commercially with a free…

What universe do you live in? Oh wait it’s the one filled with ping wangs..never mind..