Lately, I've really been thinking about social computing tools and questioning their effects on productivity. As a potential enterprise-level tool, it seems IBM is asking the same questions of Second Life. But are they really asking the same questions, or are they just assuming that they know the answers?
Since it launched in 2003, Second Life has been the go-to 3D virtual world on the Internet ... Is there a need for this virtual world within the enterprise? IBM thinks so. This month, it announced it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own servers. Read more...
When I think back to 1990, I ask myself, "Where did you read about current events? When you needed to look up or research something, where was the first place you looked? How did you catch up on missed episodes of Seinfeld or Cheers?" Think about all the things that the internet has become in a relatively short amount of time. IBM is gambling that Second Life is at the forefront of the next wave AND that there is business use-case for it. Maybe they're on to something...maybe they aren't. I wonder how it'll sift out.
Consider the broader Internet, which reached the mainstream public in the early 1990s but was initially dismissed as an irrelevant plaything of hobbyist geeks. By the mid-1990s, with the launch of commercial Web browsers, corporations were scrambling to stake out a presence online. By 2000, they had wasted hundreds of millions on Web sites that provided too little value for too few visitors. These sites were typically bland and noninteractive, or stylish but insubstantial. After the dot-com crash, however, those sites that had delivered sustained, substantial usefulness—the likes of Amazon.com (AMZN), Yahoo! (YHOO), and eBay (EBAY)—dominated. Read full article...