Rosedale opens SLCC with apology for bugs
By Eric Reuters
CHICAGO, August 25 (Reuters) - Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale kicked off the Second Life Community Convention on Saturday with an apology for recent service outages on the grid, calling Second Life’s spate of errors and unavailability “not acceptable.”
“If you look at our overall service performance, we’re somewhere above 90% availability,” Rosedale said. “There’s a lot of room for improvement there.”
Rosedale said Linden Lab never could have raised the financing necessary to build Second Life without having prioritized speed over reliability in the virtual world’s earliest days. “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.”
Rosedale pledged Linden Lab would work to keep Second Life running on a more continuous basis and quash outstanding bugs like the dreaded missing inventory problem, long a bane to Second Life’s residents. Eventually, Rosedale said, for Second Life to fulfill his dream of becoming “bigger than the web,” even scheduled maintenances would have to be phased out. “The Web does not go down for upgrades on Wednesdays,” Rosedale said to laughter and applause.
