Holiday Layoffs
Well, we go through this every year in every industry across the board. People get laid off in December. You’re coming down to the end of the last quarter, things are getting tallied up, and if the numbers don’t look good it might be your neck. Best to offer up someone else’s before it comes to that.
Let’s start with the basic rundown of the Linden Lab situation: Cory Ondrejka was fired from Linden Lab about a week ago. He was the “Chief Technology Officer”, responsible for keeping the machine well-oiled and for adding all sorts of features. Massively published the in-company memo about it, as well as Cory’s classy farewell email. (Nice scoop guys!) Everybody is holding true to the official company line that it’s a question of Philip and Cory seeing the future of the company differently.
Interpretation we’re supposed to make:
Even though Philip promised the grid would start working better, it’s actually much worse. So, he’s taking decisive measures to make good on his promise, but please remember that Cory is an innovative genius so anyone out there looking for an engineer should hire him.
The cynic in me isn’t completely buying this on the surface. The “leaked” internal memos read like press releases, first of all. I’ve never known engineers to write that well. They had help. The whole thing feels like a strong attempt to manipulate all upcoming 2007 retrospectives where we count up a few dozen extra features and no appreciable improvement in performance.
MEANWHILE…
The Electric Sheep lays off 1/3 of their staff (22 people gone). I like the Sheep, in a big-budget-blockbuster kind of way. They make mega-budget virtual world builds, and hire lots of talented people to make it happen.
The problem is the flops. I mean, they’re going to happen. Nobody bats 1.000. Now, if your budget is the same every time you can survive that kind of thing but that CSI:NY project, well… you knew that was hubris the moment you heard of it. A few dozen (literally) generic-looking cloned sims, an untested client, and a website that made actually finding the sign-up page almost impossible.
It flopped. Don’t believe any hype to the contrary - residents watched that giant grid of islands carefully. They stayed mostly vacant. That might not be so bad, but ESC bet a hell of a lot on this one. Soon after AOL announced that they were leaving Second Life, and Pontiac announced that they were on the way out too. Now it’s not just cash that down the tubes, it’s reputation.
End of the year comes, you take a look around, a hell of a lot of pressure on you, and you start to trim your projects. They’re ditching their ad network (thank goodness!) and focusing on technology items instead of gigantic builds. You can’t blame them.
Hey, it’s only the 17th. Anybody else?
December 18th, 2007 at 2:09 am
Gah, that’s a real shame. I can see the reasons behind their moves (cold, hard economics I guess) but it’s still a shame that the SL technology didn’t meet their ideas, in some cases not even half way.
Interactivity and SL - a really huge elephant in the room.