At Last The Story Can Be Told
Posted on December 14, 2006
Filed Under What's New |
No evident reason why some stories are embargoed - that is we, journalists, get to hear about them on the condition we don’t tell until the story owner, in this case IBM, says it is OK! Not a fan but I agreed to it. So earlier today I met with an avatar in IBM’s Second Life reception and narrowly avoiding a pretend train I heard him say, page up and follow my blue bubbles. Of course I was cautious after that. Today he said I could tell all.
The big news is that IBM has real life commercial customers developing Second Life consumer environments (the story’s being told here too). The one I saw was a retail store for … er. they sell electricals, iPods that kind of thing… Circuit City.
My guides for the afternoon made clear that these are pirmitive environments, the very start of the 3D web, so not to be judged as yet on the quality of experience. Client and service provider IBM are feeling their way. Were there any novel retail concepts on display? Well, you can enter a virtual living room and try out different TV models with your sofa nearer or further away from the screen to get a feel for what size TV to buy. That’s got you saying which way to Second Life?
The problem with the concepts right now is they sound hackneyed and uninteresting. Most people I know look at a TV set and ask do you do interest free?
But I don’t mean to be critical of IBM or Circuit City. The 3D web is, as they readily admit, years off. Where I see the weakness is the investment in environments and concepts. I suspect over the years these take to evolve consumers will have undergone a series of transformations.
The market as we know it will look demographically very different. A new generation of kids doing virtual very well, a fragmenting demographic over 50 exploring a variety of new lifestyle concepts and experiences may well morph into something unpredictable.
A demographic for example that is focused on the land and sustainability promoting a move away from mass farming to labour intensive crops; an urban demographic that struggles to find affordable healthy food; a demographic for whom gadgets are less compelling than new health promoting products, a demographic in the grip of security fears. The return of concepts like meaning that grip our attention.
We live in disruptive times and where I think IBM is doing the right thing is unleashing 900 of its cohort onto imagining the new world. There is some frontiersman frontierswoman stuff going down and it is inspiring.
Where they are going wrong…. sorry, shouldn’t be mean - is imagining it as it is rather than as it could, should or will be. I know from my conversations with them today they have the appetite to think differently so - fingers crossed.
Comments
WordPress database error: [Can't open file: 'wp_comments.MYI'. (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = '602' AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date
Leave a Reply