Pro “Second LIfe Enterprise”. Why does a proprietary competitor benefits an open-source solution?
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
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Linden Lab has released a beta version of Second Life Enterprise (formerly known as Nebraska) a virtual world behind a firewall, aimed at corporate collaboration. http://bit.ly/1hasiP. The solution allows simultaneous connection of 800 avatars. It includes all features of Second Life and provides a number of pre-built buildings and avatars.
In this post I hold that the bigger the success of Second Life Enterprise (SLE), the bigger the benefit for other enterprise oriented solutions. Both for those based on OpenSim such as Dot-Aula, and for the proprietary ones such as Forterra Olive, Teleplace (formerly Qwaq, etc.).
The pie grows
In mature markets (those who have reached their limit of growth) it is understandable that the entry of new competitors is not beneficial for the running firms. The cake, which has already reached its maximum size, must be now shared with hungry newcomers.
In the realm of newly born categories, on the contrary, the entry of new competitors is paradoxically beneficial. The more the better, because it helps generating awareness, publicity and sales. The pie will grow and therefore the turnover of each competitor.
Despite the work of several hundred evangelists, businesses and institutions have not yet accepted the good news of virtual worlds for business. A few of them have heard of Second Life and its avatars. But they have never imagined that this stuff might serve their organization.
With few exceptions, when we visit companies to introduce virtual worlds for business, we are breaking new grounds in their minds.
Second Life Enterprise can help significantly grow the pie of virtual worlds for business. And that pie is also made up of those who work in OpenSim, the way we do.
Because we must acknowledge that Second Life is the quintessential virtual world today. And it si Likely to remain almost synonymous with virtual world for a few years. As a result, SLE’s desirable success will serve us all.
Virtual worlds: serious gaming
Second Life Enterprise will also help to impose the idea that virtual worlds are effective tools for remote collaborative learning and not just a game.
The leisure dimension of Second Life, which has been the best known feature of the platform, it never interested me.
In one of the firs posts of this blog confessed that “I have to admit that this respectable and entertaining dimension of therapeutic Second Life does not interest me at all, even I find it pointless and bland.
Moreover, for reasons that have guided our work in training, the negative connotations associated with Second Life we often assume an additional obstacle to overcome to reach the customer’s mind. The bailongo, the lightweight Charlita virtual sex with that is sometimes associated with Second Life is not much help to sell training, business meetings, virtual events, etc..
And besides if open source is significantly cheaper …
In OpenSim vs.Second Life we maintained that many of the benefits of OpenSim lied on the fact that OpenSim operates behind the firewall. Second Life now also works behind the firewall.
But, the open and modular system of OpenSim allows us to develop new features to suit the needs of each organization. In Second Life this obviously less flexible.
On the other hand, as SLE has an annual price of over $ 55,000, OpenSim solutions can be very competitive in price.
