Texte intéressant de Gwynett Llewelyn, une analyste réputée de Second Life
Curious and curiouser
It would certainly explain:
1) The drop of so many employees, specially the good developers. Microsoft has most of the best developers in the world — second only to Google.
2) The focus on the residential market. Not even Microsoft would be able to push Second Life as an Enterprise product. But they’re growing well on the residential market: their PC games division and the Xbox division might not be profitable, but, overall, only two divisions at M$ are profitable: Windows and Office.
3) The drop of Avatars United. Microsoft already owns a large share of the social web-based tools… Facebook. Live.com is almost Dead.com compared with Facebook… so… that would explain why Microsoft developers did try to make authentication to OpenSim possible using Live IDs, and the change to Display Names would also make sense.
4) LL surprisingly moved away from IBM and Intel (which, in turn, started focusing way more aggressively on OpenSim instead), and from the effort of moving towards an interconnected grid… which didn’t make absolutely no sense at all. Unless, of course, they had started “romancing” Microsoft…
5) Microsoft might be interested in using its Bing search technology and its own ad system to replace Google as the 3D content search engine, and place ads/classifieds in SL, like they did on Facebook — which allegedly is giving them a return of 1 US$ billion annually (no, that still won’t make Facebook profitable, I’m afraid).
So there might be something about it.
What doesn’t make much sense…
1) Microsoft continues to invest on OpenSim. They’ve got some presence on grids like Reaction Grid.
2) LL’s technology (except for the viewer) is all hard-core Unix and open source-based. There is no way it can all be ported to Windows; and even subtly introducing closed-source, licensed libraries back into the viewer would skyrocket the costs of distributing the viewer, which would have to be supported by the residents… or by Microsoft. LL’s revenues wouldn’t cover that! By contrast, OpenSim is all written in C# and runs as well under .NET as under Mono (some say it runs even better under .NET), which would make it far more attractive to Microsoft developers than LL’s own code.
3) The “radical technology” that Linden Lab developed for SL — 3D content streaming — is being phased out by HTTP transfers. So Microsoft wouldn’t even be able to patent that technology: it’s not used by anyone else, and not even LL is sticking to it. There is really no “radical new technology” in SL — it’s just the overall product that is innovative, and, of course, the virtual world itself (its society and economy) is very valuable.
4) Why would MS be interested in selling ads to a million or so users when they have half a billion in Facebook?
So, I don’t know…
En résumé:
Ce qui a du sens
1) Celà expliquerait le licenciement des meilleurs programmeurs de SL, Microsoft ayant les meilleurs programmeurs - après ceux de Google.
2) Le recentrage sur le marché résidentiel au profit du marché entreprise
3)Le lâchage de Avatars United, Microsoft possédant déjà de larges parts du réseau social le plus important...Facebook. La possibilité d'utiliser des noms d'avatars s'expliquerait mieux aussi. (Utilisation de Live IDs?)
4)Le fait que Linden s'éloigne d'IBM et d'Intel na pas de sens...sauf s'il y a une "romance" avec microsoft.
5)Microsoft pourrait être intéressé par le remplacement de la recherche Google par son moteur Bing (et le rendement publicitaire associé)
Ce qui en a moins
1) Microsoft continue à investir dans OpenSim
2)La technologie SL (a part le viewer) est entièrement basée sur Unix et est open source donc pas possible de la porter sous windows.
3)Si le produit SL vaut de part ses membres et de son économie, rien dans la technologie n'est nouveau, utilisable ailleurs ou brevetable.
4)Pourquoi Microsoft serait-il intéressé à vendre de la pub à un million d'utilisateurs alors qu'ils touchent un demi milliard de gens via facebook ?
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