Back in June 2013, I had the opportunity to interview Rod Humble for Prim Perfect magazine. As explained in the piece, things didn’t entirely go according to plan, and I have to admit to being a little disappointed with the end result. Due to various reasons, the piece didn’t see the light of day until Issue 49 of Prim Perfect, which appeared in September 2013, and which is available on-line and in-world. What follows here is the article in full, reprinted with permission.
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2013 marks the 10th Anniversary of Second Life as a publicly accessible platform. In that time, Linden Lab has seen it grow from a small venture into a product which, whilst still niche, generates revenues in the region of $75 million a year, and keeps people from around the globe logging-in to it as a part of their daily routine.
In that time four men have helmed the Lab through highs and lows: Philip Rosedale, the man responsible for starting it all, Mark Kingdon, Bob Komin, who also served as the Lab’s CFO, and Rod Humble, known to us all as Rodvik Linden.
Humble, a veteran of Virgin Interactive, Sony Online and EA Games, brought considerable games industry experience with him when he joined the Lab at the start of 2011. Since then, he’s been the driving force behind a huge amount of work on Second Life, and in trying to expand the company’s product portfolio with a growing range of apps and games.
As part of Second Life’s anniversary celebrations, he spent a lot of time being interviewed in many venues and through a variety of media platforms. Our request to be included generated a warm and positive response, but was then derailed somewhat by scheduling issues on all sides.
Originally, the idea had been to converse via Skype, but as the scheduling conflicts bit, we were forced to use e-mail as the medium of exchange. While not ideal, it at least gave me the opportunity to gain a small window into the mind of the man in charge of the virtual world we feel so very passionate about.
I started out by turning the clock back and asking him what initially drew him to accepting the CEO position at the Lab, specifically what was it about the company, as well as the platform, that attracted him.
I immediately saw and fell in love with SL when I was approached. I was delighted and amazed at the creativity within the world.
As a platform, Second Life puts an incredible amount of power in the users’ hands, which is obvious from the range and complexity of things people have created in-world. Beyond the platform itself, I think a key strength of Second Life is the model of allowing users to monetize their creations. That sets up a situation where everyone wins – users are rewarded for being creative, and the virtual world continually gets fresh and interesting content and experiences for everyone, beyond what would be possible if Linden Lab had to create everything.
His tenure at the Lab has not only been marked by the introduction of new capabilities to the platform – the most notable perhaps being mesh and pathfinding – but by a strong push to improve usability, and performance. Not long after he arrived, the viewer was given a major overhaul and underwent extensive user testing. More recently, we’ve seen a 12-month effort under the umbrella title of “Project Shining” aimed at massively improving SL’s performance and stability. Given this emphasis, I asked him if he saw matters of performance and so on as potential threats to the viability of the platform when he first joined the company.
Any active user of Second Life can tell you that performance is a big issue. It’s a hard one for us to solve as well, because of the inherent complexity of the platform and the huge number of variables involved – like differences in broadband speeds, hardware specs, etc. But, it’s an area that I’m proud to say we’re making great strides in with efforts like Project Sunshine. Users should see bigger performance improvements from that project as the server-side changes roll-out.
But there were also other usability issues – like the complexity of Magic Boxes for Marketplace deliveries and the confusing number of communications tools – that we’ve worked to improve.
Two long-term issues for the platform have been user sign-ups and user retention. When it came to sign-ups, Humble again quickly made his presence felt, overseeing a top-to-toe redesign of the account creation process. This resulted in a significant increase in the number of daily sign-ups, one which still sees some 400,000 new accounts created monthly. However user retention has remained elusive; only around 20% of new accounts are still active a month after signing-up.
By Humble’s own admission, this is not a an exciting figure, and he’s set himself and the Lab the goal of improving it, going so far as to say his ambition is to get all those who said “Meh” to SL “back”. As a part of this, the Lab has resumed its examinations of the “new user experience”, testing new “Social Islands” and “Learning Islands” alongside the existing “Destination Islands” in an attempt to find out what does and doesn’t work.
This renewed interest on the Lab’s part led me to wonder if it might mean we’ll be seeing something in the way of directed experiences, so that “modellers get to aeroplanes rather than a nightclub”, to paraphrase a remark he famously made in the SL Universe forums in 2012.
Continue reading “Be he ever so Humble: my interview with LL’s CEO”
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 