First of all, you don’t build pyramids by throwing everything away and starting afresh. Well, you can, but they’ll be small pyramids, stifled at birth. If you ride on the shoulders of those giants that we hear about so often, you not only cover more ground, but you also see further ahead. It’s not only a metaphor: by not needing to reinvent everything, you actually have more time for insight and vision. Both commercially and in terms of empowerment, you start streets ahead.

And secondly, Lindens crystallized two very important corporate insights when they gave life to the AWG: the fact that scalability and interoperability are, for quite different reasons, limits to growth in this area.

The scalability issue needs no elaboration: the mile-high flames coming out of Linden Towers are a testament to what happens when you lose sight of the scalability ball.

Lack of interoperability doesn’t cause meltdown, but it can be just as limiting and debilitating. Unlike transiently visiting websites, people do not have the hours in the day to “live” in hundreds and thousands of virtual worlds concurrently. MMOG gaming worlds today sequester players into their little universes and hold them there as subscription fodder, but that model has no hope of growing beyond current confines: both people’s wallets and the hours in the day are extremely finite resources. This observation leaves us with two alternative endpoints on the spectrum: either live with the MMOG model and carve up the 3D universe into a million tiny pies of which you can enjoy only a handful, or else interoperate and let people load up their personal smorgasboards from a billion planet-wide chefs. Lindens clearly share my all-embracing palate.

And of course, once you decide to interoperate, then using existing world content as a foundation comes naturally, which makes the pro-interop viewpoint support the importance of user-generated content.

Many metaphors were harmed in the making of this post. I don’t apologize.

Morg.