Philip Rosedale, CEO of Second Life creator Linden Lab and founder of the virtual world, announced Friday that he will step down from his post.
He assured Second Life enthusiasts that he would remain on full-time at the company as chairman of the board.
Rosedale, known in Second Life by his avatar's name Philip Linden, did not provide a concrete date for his change in role, only saying that the company has "decided to search for a new CEO."
(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)
He continued: "This is a decision driven by my desire to best grow SL and match my job to both our needs and my passions. We don't have a specific timeline, and I don't expect my job to change while we are looking for someone."
It sounds like the company is looking for a veteran business professional rather than a futurist visionary. "I feel that the most important contributions I have made and will continue to make to Second Life are related to building both the product and the company through my direct contributions to vision, strategy, and design," Rosedale wrote in a post on the official Second Life blog.
"As we grow, the role of our CEO will increasingly be to hire and grow the right team--to lead and help the company scale--to thousands of people and tens of millions of users of Second Life."
Corporate upheaval at Linden Lab has been going on for some time now. In December, Chief Technology Officer Cory Ondrejka left the company, and leaked e-mails seemed to indicate that Rosedale had fired him over creative differences.
Second Life, meanwhile, has been going through some rough patches outside of the boardroom. A series of banking scandals earlier this year led the virtual world to effectively ban in-world banks. Issues with vandalism and political radicalism briefly shook the community, and it has still failed to rebound from the backlash that followed in the wake of breathless media hype about virtual worlds.
These days, when you hear about Second Life in the mainstream media, it's coming from dweeby Dwight Schrute on The Office. Linden Lab likely hopes to pull in a CEO who can change that.
Griefing, like this prankster's 'Super Mario' barrage, is one of the reasons behind 'Second Life's' more-than-occasional server problems. To be fair, this Mario army did not crash the virtual world.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)Virtual world Second Life, the centerpiece of this weekend's Second Life Community Convention in Chicago, has occasionally come under fire for its outages. Scheduled downtime, unpredicted outages, server crashes due to onslaughts of thousands of Super Mario graphics flooding the tubes (those are from griefers, natch)--it's a headache for newbies and avid residents alike.
But in his keynote at the convention on Saturday morning, Philip Rosedale, the founder and CEO of Second Life parent company Linden Lab, suggested that we all look on the bright side. The virtual world is active about 90 percent of the time, he said.
"If you look at our overall service performance lately, we're sort of somewhere above 90 percent availability once you include the planned downtimes for updates and you include the unplanned stuff that we seem to be doing to ourselves," he said self-deprecatingly. Then he added, "That's one nine, and it's better to have one nine than not any nines at all."
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