When Will Microsoft Go Big On Virtual Worlds?

At Microsoft Island in Second Life

So this month, Microsoft's mortal competitor Google has jumped full into virtual worlds (at least, of the 2D, Web-driven variety); in itself, that suggests Ballmer and company will quickly follow with a response of their own.  Two recent news items solidifies that intution: Microsoft Developer Network evangelist Zain Naboulsi praising virtual world collaboration to the stars, telling tech analyst Erica Driver how cost-effective they are for marketing and enterprise use.  (A recent MS product launch in Second Life, he enthused to Driver, attracted 150% attendance, 90% of whom stayed the entire day, at a cost far cheaper than it'd be if they held a comparable conference event in the real world.)  Meanwhile, over at Reuters' Second Life site, Naboulsi is enthusing about Open Sim, the open source virtual world with limited interoperability with Second Life, and talking about plans to integrate several Microsoft services into the platform.  Microsoft had only planned to use their Second Life presence for a one-time event, Eric Reuters writes, but instead, "[Naboulsi] tied his company back into the virtual worlds space by holding meetings of Microsoft developers in Second Life, and grew .NET user groups from 20 to almost 800 members."  All this virtual world enthusiasm may be isolated to a single node of the Microsoft hive mind, of course, but with Google having made its move into this space, it's worth keeping an eye on.

"The Microsoft dev community is growing very fast in OpenSim," Tish Shute of UGOTrade, the leading site on Open Sim coverage, tells me. "[O]ne does wonder where that will lead!"  One does indeed.

(Hat tip: Joey Seiler.)

Comments

[anomouse]

heres to hopeing MS will buy out LL!!

[Danton Sideways]

I personally dislike Microsoft for their monopolistic practices, but all the computers I use run Windows, and most of them run MS Office. This is a clear case of putting practical considerations ahead of ideological ones.

In like manner, the developers of OpenSim, who probably would have prefered to use something open like Linux, chose to write OpenSim in C# so that it could run under the Microsoft .NET runtime. The OpenSim developers did this in order to benefit from the advantages of using such a widely-known programming environment.

This also may be one explanation for the increasing presence of Microsoft developers in OpenSim: with the .NET runtime they find themselves completely in their own element.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

Though it's a controversial issue, there is a C# for Linux. Look up the Mono project.