We have an industry


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  1. Well Howard,

    You have always been big on that “crossing the chasm” way of looking at what technologies become widely adopted and what companies make money as technologies move from “early adoption” to “widespread adoption”. In order for a company to prosper and a technology to become widely adopted, there must be one market segment which the technology/company are the unambiguous leaders.

    I don’t do much in “virtual worlds”– unless you describe the Net itself as such a virtual world. So I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.

    But it seems that the “market segments” emerging & their related technologies are:

    1) Corporate collaboration — Quaq/forums/croquet

    2) Online gaming — World of Warcraft & its model.

    3) “higher education” — online college, and whatever it morphs into. Is croquet also the technology leader here?

    4) Social networking — Facebook

    Meanwhile I’m stuck in flatland, writing books and running a very retro blog.

    I guess, like Brian Wilson, I just wasn’t made for these times.

  2. Yup. Also:

    5) Simulations/Visualizations – walk around collaboratively among the molecules. It’s hard to see how anything that doesn’t use the Croquet Tea-time model could do this on a large scale. However, that same model means that there’s a lot of work to include a replicated physics model that is a prerequisite for a lot of simulations.

    6) Training – A cross-over between 1, 3, and 5. All of the categories have their own existing industry standards, norms, relationships and expectations established outside of VW. In some cases, the existing standards don’t matter yet because the VW-based stuff is disruptive. In some cases they do matter. For training, the existing stuff does seem to matter. Leader here is Forterra.

    7) The future. No market (nor enabling technology) yet for
    * convergence. e.g., VW is your operating system for your computer, mobile phone, and toaster.
    * mixed reality. e.g., VW is projected onto the real world around you, augmenting it with info, capabilities, and decoration.

    So, what category is Second Life?

    By the way, John, I don’t think you’re wrong for these times at all. In particular, I’ve read novels that are set in VW where the bad guy is an AI and where the bad guy and its corporate/government henchmen/dupes are using VW to act their ills. Otherwise the VWs are portrayed rather nicely. I haven’t read anything of ordinary human corporations and politicians using VW as an evil itself. How about it?

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