"[W]e really should be eating more of our own dog food." -- Philip Rosedale, interview with Atlassian Software.For all the efforts to be innovative and progressive as a company, and certainly, in many ways they are, Linden Lab gives the perception of moving in the opposite direction, becoming increasingly tied to a bricks and mortar operation, and just not taking advantage of their own product in the ways they expect and encourage others to do so.
What's up with that, and what's the whole obsession with dog-food?
"Eating your own dog-food" is a popular phrase among software and product makers, echoing long-held sentiments in the pet food industries, that "A dog food manufacturer ought to be willing to eat the food he produces."
That is, the people who make the product should use it, otherwise many of it's shortcomings never become apparent, and there is little incentive to fix them. Big issues are obvious -- your product explodes and kills every third person who plugs it in. Those things get addressed very quickly. What you don't catch are the thousand little issues that plague the user every day -- It's hard to open; the corners are too sharp; the cords are too short; it fails on a hot day.
If your staff aren't willing or able to use the product you make, perhaps you're doing something wrong. To look at it from another angle, if your staff aren't willing or able to use the product you're certainly going to do something wrong, if you haven't already.
For example, in March 2006 Phoenix Linden discovered that vehicle crossings across sim boundaries were a problem - after more than a year of complaints and bug reports on this issue by residents. The issue had apparently gone unnoticed by the development team, until one of them actually tried it. As of this writing, the issue remains unfixed, despite the promise that "someone will look into that soon".
Apparently nobody at Linden Lab noticed this before, or nobody communicated this clearly to the developers; It's for darn sure that nobody at Linden Lab has had to explain it to virtually every new resident in Second Life, day after day, and be asked "Well what good are vehicles if they all do that? Why are there all these roads?"
So, the question is: Why don't the Linden Lab staff use Second Life more often as a part of their jobs? Do they lack the time? Or -- as many suspect -- does it just not meet their needs as a business? Does it not provide the communication and collaboration tools that a business full of technically adept and knowledgeable users need to do their jobs? Must they resort to phones and fax machines, pen and paper, white-boards and face-to-face meetings to get any actual work done?
A question I'm asked often by people starting new businesses in art or other creation is "What should I make? What will sell?"
I tell them, "Make something you would spend your money on. If you wouldn't buy it, why should anyone else?"
The same holds here. If the dog-food is not nutritious, and doesn't smell good, why should other people consume it? If Linden Lab cannot use it as an effective communications and collaboration medium, how and why should they expect any other business, corporation or organization to?
Perhaps if they did start to work as a more connected organization through Second Life, then there would be some more focus on the more distressing issues, as well as improvement to tools that we could all use.
1. Cory from Linden labs came to my gov agency (unnamed!) to do a presentation. One of the interesting side comments was that Linden Labs (personnel) was really more a bunch of hardware guys (and sysadmins) than anything else.
which really sheds light on why they might not use it as much, since Second Life really lends itself to "creative" types.
Now I'm not saying sysadmins and hardware people can't be creative (one might argue the artistic nature of a perfectly written Perl script!) but let's face it not many sysadmins and hardware people are closet painters or writers.
I suspect they probably enjoy more of their time coding second life than using it in complex social ways that many Second Lifers do.
Posted at 9:16AM on Dec 28th 2006 by Doug