In a few days we're going to have people using the new OnRez Second Life viewer. Maybe a lot of people. Maybe a whole lot of people. The OnRez viewer differs from Linden Lab's version most obviously in that the user-interface has been completely reworked to make it easier and less overwhelming on new users.
That's got to be a good thing, right? Well, not necessarily. It brings some challenges of its own.
The problem looks like it will be one of support. Outside of OnRez, every resource and How-To more or less relies on the basic Linden Lab viewer. There are a number of other editions around, but the user-interface in those has undergone no huge overhauls. Everything is pretty much where it normally is. With the OnRez viewer, things are obviously substantively different.
You won't be able to give sensible instructions about 'look here; click this' without knowing which viewer the person is using and having had some experience using it yourself.
Of course, a viewer fork was inevitable. This is the first major one, but it won't be the last. We can expect to see more revised user-interfaces out there over time. Probably in the long term we won't see dozens in wide use, but it would not be unexpected to see three-to-five quite different viewer user-interfaces emerge as relatively dominant.
1. The success or failure of any software product does not just depend on the quality of the product, but also the ecosystem it lives within.
I read an article a while back about invasive species in Hawaii. Even though some of them were more efficient, they did not take over unless they were at least three times more efficient. They concluded that the native species had all of these other support links with the ecosystem that helped it survived.
The article went on to draw other analogs. For example the NeXT operating system was generally considered much better on many levels than Windows. But this alone was not enough to compete with the installed user base, software avaiable, and existing skill sets supporting Windows. (Alas.)
So onrez might look much better than the classic viewer. But in the long run it's success will also partly depend on in the same sorts of support structures you mention for the classic viewer. If we are going to take the biologist's article at face value, the question to as is "is it three times better?".
Posted at 8:42AM on Oct 22nd 2007 by Jaymin Carthage