Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, apologized today to an audience at the Second Life Community Convention for the frequent system outages in the virtual world of Second Life. While a number of sources have been blogging Rosedale's keynote from the SLCC, the apology is taking the forefront above and beyond any of his other comments both in the Reuters story and in the minds of many attendees. From VWN:
Let me just start for everybody with addressing what’s probably on everybody’s mind. Let me start with an apology. [opens jacket to display “Missing Image” shirt.] That’s me in your way. That’s us as a company in the way of everybody manufacturing a future. WE shouldn’t be the most visible part of what’s happening here. And lately we’re more visible because of all the problems.
By way of explanation, Rosedale offers that it has been necessary for Linden Lab to operate as an experimental group in order to create the world in the first place. Reuters quotes him saying:
“We were this crazy, small group of people willing to work very fast, with frankly a real lack of concern or respect for the challenges that people would have in using this thing,” he said. “But we were willing to work that fast, and were in fact aggressive about doing things that way, because we never would have made it.”
This is the first time Linden Lab has ever indicated that the system outages are worthy of concern. The grass-roots movement "Project Open Letter" succeeded in getting a few technical details revealed about the structure of the Second Life grid, but nothing approaching an apology to their customers ensued at the time. Rosedale's comments may be a reaction to the rush of bad press they have been getting lately, or an indication that they're realizing they aren't the only virtual world of interest anymore and customer service needs to become a priority.
Alternately this may be an indicator of how secure Rosedale feels about imminent moves toward stability. The company blog recently indicated that both a new physics engine (Havok 4) and a new scripting language (Mono) are about to enter the beta phase. Companies rarely apologize if they can't deliver on a solution. After a month of some of the worst performance ever witnessed it won't take much to improve, but hopefully this is an indicator that the promises of future stability aren't as empty as they have been in the past.