Con Phil

In New York City, we have a public utility for electricity we call "Con Ed," I guess it's short for "Consolidated Edison". People often curse Con Ed for various things, like those steaming man-hole covers, which explode sometimes, or for these ridiculously high bills in some apartment buildings where they have some kind of unit fee that they insist has to be paid just to heat the hallways -- not your apartment -- or your apartment would freeze. Still, Con Ed is just...there. When it explodes itself, you worry about terrorism. Most of the time, it works. You don't think about it, it's...a utility. It doesn't become involved in the content of your life; it's the substrate of your life. Electricity provided by Con Ed keeps you warm and gives you light and helps you do your job, homework, and even play Second Life.

If you looked in your Google news for SL today, you'll discover that Philip Rosedale now says that Second Life is "a kind of public utility". Con Phil! Or Phil con. Right on schedule (I had just mentioned the other day that he hadn't been around to analyze the economy lately) David Kirkpatrick of Fortune, who has been a very special friend of the Lindens (he was the journalist who got the embargoed story about open-sourcing the viewer and was able to post his article about 15 minutes before the Blob formed us, if I recall correctly) has done a very positive story about Second Life and Philip. Say, I've turned in a positive story (see next post below) about the economy myself, flying in the face of a lot more negative, some from very seasoned and astute quarters.

Even so, I had to goggle at this one. A utility? A thing you utilize? I was just telling Shaun Altman about this, and he was quipping that we were "utilizing the utility" when...suddenly I was pitched off world, and then my avatar got tinier in the deep murk of offworldness, just as an avatar with the perfect-for-this-moment name of Incredible Tomorrow came online (having crashed himself minutes ago) and then...I crashed. The system logged me out. It couldn't log me in again, it said. Then it told me it couldn't connect me to this version of Second Life. Or...any version. Ok. We'll wait : )

A utility?! Well, if this is a utility, then...unban me from the forums, please, because utilities don't ban people, they don't get involved in content. And stop monkeying with governance tools, we can make our own...

Hmmm. Actually, do public utilities have forums?

Comments

[Cocoanut Koala]

Don't have time to really read, today, but yeah, "public utility," how, erm, stupid.

Anyway, forget which article is which, and don't have time to read, but regarding what we were discussing on the other thread, Philip did say SL was "solidly profitable" here:

http://money.cnn.com/2007/12/20/technology/kirkpatrick_rosedale.fortune/?postversion=2007122105

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

Coco, I should think SL would have to be solidly profitable by now, given the growth, even if slowed, and the revenue. What I don't get is whether they "paid back the investors". That seems like a big order.

[Cocoanut Koala]

Well, as of that town hall, which must have been a year ago by now, Philip did say they were "very close" to paying them off.

And, like I said, sometime a little while thereafter, somebody said that they had paid them.

In any case, I think given what was said a year ago, and what was said in the article above, we can safely conclude that yes, SL is profitable, as in, altogether in the black.

coco