Forrester Research looks at why Second Life hasn’t taken off. Analyst Tom Grant says that the service’s most loyal customers are holding it back:
Gaetano Mosca noted the tendency of an elite group to form in any organization–what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The elite wields some combination of power and influence, more or less of each depending on the setting. In the US Senate, senior senators have power over things like committee appointments. The parents who really call the shots at PTA meetings may not sit on the PTA board at all, but have considerable influence over the faculty, staff, and other parents. (And then there’s this comic but terrifying story of a bare-knuckles political battle among department store Santas…)
The same Iron Law holds true of user communities. Over time, a subset of customers emerge who participate regularly in user group meetings, discussion forums, the comments sections of blogs, groups in social media channels, and other channels of face-to-face and electronic communication. Because vendors are interested in feedback, this group of notables get increasing attention from product managers, product marketers, and the like. Unless the company takes deliberate steps to mitigate the Iron Law of Oligarchy, a small and often unrepresentative sample of users will wield disproportionate influence over the vendor’s thinking about products and services.
Second Life is an extreme case of how you can develop a very happy group of customers, and still fail miserably at reaching a wider audience. Some businesses are comfortable with that outcome, as long as the customer base stays loyal, and the business stays profitable. Most would be terrified to discover that their best customers are, in subtle ways, holding them back. I can’t say for sure that the Second Life notables are the reason why the UI is still klunky, and the useful content is hard to find, but I definitely have my suspicions.
It’s a nice theory, but it suffers from the main fault of most outside analyses of Second Life problems: The author didn’t do research. His evidence is thin. He doesn’t have any experience with Second Life, he comes right out and says so upfront, and he didn’t talk to people with Second Life experience either. He read an article by someone else who did do the research, and also read the comments on that article.
New World Notes’s Wagner James Au is more charitable than I, he says Grant is half-right:
I’ve seen a similar phenomena on this blog, in many of the responses to my editorial series on making Second Life more mass market:
To a significant degree, the distinct tenor was active and almost angry resistance to the features that might make Second Life easier to learn, and more accessible to the tens of million who regularly play virtual worlds, and the 10+ million who downloaded the SL software, but found it too intimidating and confounding. As one reader put it succinctly, “Don’t dumb down things for the riff raff.”
But Grant is only half right. For every Second Life user who could scarcely care less if SL fails to go mainstream (even if that ultimately leads to SL’s decline), there’s a plethora of content creators, educators, enterprise users, and many more who want Second Life to get big, and indeed, have a deep personal and professional stake in seeing that happen. (Including, well, me.) Consequently, Second Life’s userbase also devotes more energy and effort to growing and improving, and defending itself from outside critics, than just about any other Internet product. That’s a rare and precious thing.
Second Life has a cadre of users who seem to hate everything that Linden Lab does, and complain bitterly about every change. Most of the service’s users seem content to shut up and use Second Life. If they get dissatisfied, they don’t complain much, they just stop logging in.
Some of the most vocal complaints seem justified, but many of them are just silly. For the silly variety, see the first comment on this post — for Pete’s sake, he’s a new employee introducing himself, don’t start complaining right away! It must be hard to do customer service for Linden Lab, the group of users who complain loudly about everything must make it hard for management to find the complaints that actually should be listened to.
I’ve seen the opposite of the Iron Law of Oligarchy at work. Twenty years ago, I was extremely active on an online service called GEnie. Owned by General Electric, GEnie was a market leader in the early 90s, the period of three years or so before the Internet really took off in 1994, when consumers mostly connected their computers over proprietary online services, including GEnie, CompuServe and AOL.
Like Second Life, GEnie had a small but fiercely loyal user base. But GEnie management had a history of hostility to its most loyal users. In an era when online services charged hourly rates for usage, GEnie launched a pay-one-price, all-you-can-eat service plan, and then management complained when users took advantage of it and stayed connected a long time. What did the management expect, anyway?
GEnie management commissioned a shiny new Windows user interface — Windows was new then — and ignored vocal criticism from existing users who said the new client software was crap.
GEnie management consistently behaved as if its existing, loyal customers really didn’t understand the service, and the existing customers’ needs were hostile to the needs of the millions of new customer who would come into the service any day now.
GEnie alienated its existing customers, and the anticipated new customers never came.
In 1992, GEnie was the second largest online service in the world, competing hot and heavy with CompuServe. AOL was a distant third, and the Internet was still only being used by a small group of researchers. Over the course of the next eight years, AOL bought CompuServe and then Time-Warner, the Internet took over the world, and GEnie — whose management thought its existing customers were idiots — shut down on Jan. 1, 2000. GEnie is now pretty much forgotten.
Second Life has a lot of problems, but its most loyal customers — even the ones who complain about everything — are not among them. They are the service’s greatest asset. To Linden Lab’s credit, they seem to understand this. From what I understand, the company plans a lot of changes to relaunch the service over the next six months. By summer, I think we’ll know for sure whether Second Life has a bright future, or whether it will follow GEnie and die the long, slow death of obsolete online communities.
