A Second Life for Second Life?
Interesting piece on BBC Online today about the rise and fall of Second Life…
An excellent lesson in how overhyping something can be disastrous for a company.
The article highlights that navigational issues and heavy graphics have presented challenges to Second LIfe’s adoption….but in reality, people read the hype and went there with their expectations completely out of whack and Second Life simply couldn’t live up to them.
The PR industry learned this lesson in the dot com era…surely? Back then, it was largely the PR sector driven by large-ego’d youthful CEOs and aggressive VC’s that were the source of the hype.
These days it’s more likely to be driven by the new media as it is by PR – this piece on Infoworld talks about Michael Arrington’s vapourware about the non existent Google branded handset.
Meanwhile, Second Life is trying to reinvent itself as an Enterprise application with Second Life Enterprise - a $55K hardware applicance that allows companies to run Second Life on their own networks. Apparently “Second Life offers an advantage over conference calls and online conference apps such as Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO)’s WebEx, in that it creates the illusion that participants in an event are sharing the same place and time.”
Really? I think I’d rather spend $55K on airfares or taxis to actually get everyone in the same room.
As with the recent British Airways / Harvard Business School study, and theme of BA’s latest marketing campaign, face to face meetings are really irreplaceable.