Yesterday I facilitated a brainstorming session on the topic “Second Life for Businesses – fad or business asset?”. The event was part of the LIFT’07 conference, but was organized and hosted at Arvetica. To reflect on “fad” or “business asset” we split the 20 participants into three groups in order to write the storyboard for two scenarios:
Scenario A – Dec, 2008: In an interview with the Financial Times (FT) Sam Palmisano (CEO, IBM) explains to the newspaper why they fell for the Second Life fad and lost 85 mio USD of investment in the process…
and
Scenario B – Dec, 2008: The Financial Times (FT) publishes an article stating that Second Life is business as usual and that 85% of all Fortune Global 500 companies have established a major Second Life presence…
At the end all participants voted if Second Life (or virtual worlds in general) was a fad or a potentially important business asset. Have a look at the slides to find out about the results.
The event was quite fun and the 20 participants seemed to enjoy the thinking. You can download the full set of slides here (12mb because of full-sized workshop photos)
ATTENTION: At Arvetica (the consulting boutique I work for) we will soon organize and host a 2 day workshop on “Second Life Immersion for Executives and Marketing Professionals”. This event will help business people “live” and understand Second Life and get a feel for the potential business models. Send us an email if you want to be informed about this workshop.
The outcome of the brainstorm session was very interesting indeed! Second Life is the first 3d virtual world of this kind. It would wonder if Linden Labs got everything right in the first try. The whole concept was very open wide at the beginning. Would it be possible to predict the kind of emergent social, economical and technical phenomena that emerged? Hardly… They just keep trying to manage Second Life ad-hoc (in the best sense of the expression). Also, seems quite clear that the technological infrastructure was not well designed since the beginning (can you stand that lag??!).
Anyway, I believe Second Life is the best and most successful approximation to the concept of “metaverse” created by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book “Snow Crash” (definitely worth reading). In there, we find a society that is widely connected and immersed in the virtual world (socially and economically), which is just the thing SL didn’t manage to get.