IBM, one of the nation’s largest companies, sees a big future in 3D worlds — but it probably won’t be with Second Life.
IBM has been eager to try out 3D marketing, for reasons we’ll get to. Like other companies, it created a virtual Business Center in Second Life (you’ll need to have an account at SL to go there), staffed by live sales avatars during business hours. It had more than 2,000 visitors in the first two weeks it was open and IBM’s island was rated first among corporate islands by at least one study. It has led to at least two sales leads, the company says. Visitors can pull down technical manuals and click to download PDFs straight from Second Life.
However, it chose Second Life only because the San Francisco company is the most popular virtual site; other corporate marketers were trying it out too.
However, IBM doesn’t care much about Second Life, and is now looking for other venues. A virtual world that offers companies like IBM an open architecture, or interoperability with other virtual worlds and sites, would be a big hit, suggested Lee Dierdorf, VP of web strategy and enablement, in a conversation with VentureBeat Friday. “What started me down this path wasn’t Second Life,” he said of his desire to experiment with 3D, but rather “Tom Cruise in Minority Report.” He recalls watching Cruise creating vignettes from different action movies, and realizing how powerful the visual experience can be for researching. “Do I think anonymous avatars dressed in funny clothes are the future of business? No, that doesn’t interest me.” Second Life remains too closed and quirky, he said, for IBM to settle on it long-term.
His comments come as Forbes publishes an article suggesting that corporate islands haven’t had many visitors. Erik Hauser of Swivel Media, Wells Fargo’s digital agency, says in the piece: “Going into Second Life now is the equivalent of running a field marketing program in Iraq.” David Churbuck, Web-marketing vice president for computer maker Lenovo, the company that bought IBM’s personal computing division and which doesn’t have a presence in Second Life, adds: “There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid.”
Now, IBM’s corporate homepage ranks among the top seven globally, with 24 million visits to its domain in April.
So Dierdorf is giving plenty of thought about how to structure the site. He showed us the latest features during our meeting. They’re impressive: AJAX lets you drill from the IBM.com homepage down three levels of hierarchy, by simply mousing over links — getting you directly to the division you want, with a single click. There’s more, such as tracking features that note your interests and then providing personalized tips on the right side of the page. We looked at HP.com, IBM’s chief rival, and it doesn’t offer the same degree of navigation.
However, despite all this stuff, Dierdorf is convinced that a 3D technology is even more powerful for customers.
3D offers a way to search with periphery vision, and breaks out of the scroll-up-down-click-and-maybe-get-lost mode. If IBM offered customers a virtual archive, complete with stacks of shelves, where customers can stroll into this archive room and pull out any information the want — or ask a virtual librarian for more help — efficiency would be increased substantially. IBM has twice the content of Google, Dierdorff says, enough pages to fill an average small town library (37,000 80-page books). So far, the 3D experiment has worked in Second Life, but he’s looking for something easier and more open.
(Image courtesy of CNET)
9 Comments
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Rich said:
Churbuck states, “There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid.”
Interesting… I’ve never seen that as my sole purpose (or even an interest) in Second Life endeavors. There are entire cultures built around technology in SL. There are scripters, builders, artists, musicians, audio engineers, video engineers, education programs, web consultants, etc. I know of entire community groups that only discuss and work in computer related technologies within Second Life.
If one can only find that the sole purpose is to get laid, is it possible that is the only goal that one had in mind upon entering this virtual world environment? -
Hugh Toppe said:
I think there are people at IBM who get what Second Life and other immersive virtual environments are about, but they are not ones that appear in this article. If you think it is about technology (a 3D interface), then go back to VRML and prepare to fail again. Any real-world retailer who thinks that consumers want to slog through 3D malls and look at obscured views of packages on 3D shelves has it wrong and will not be successful in Second Life or anywhere else. Regarding “openness”, Second Life is as open and flexible as any other environment, with additional interoperability features about to be announced. It does have an extremely frustrating (and possibly even fatal) quality of crashing regularly. But likely any other environment that had ramped up to 40,000 concurrent users in a short period of time would have its share of glitches. The growth rate is about 20% per month (doubling every six months). There is more than $1M per day being spent in the Second Life economy, but it is not people buying Thinkpads or real-world goods, and not likely to be so, no matter which virtual world you choose.
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Blovio said:
Not that I have an opinion on this, but…
Second Life is a flash in the pan. I know marketers at Sun who have tried similar experiments (Jonathan Scwartz’s JavaOne keynote simulcast in SL, for example). The net-net: zilch. SL is not a plac to try to conduct enterprise business. Perhaps it’s a place for consumer brands like Coke, Pepsi and Hillary Clinton to reach out, but for the marketing folks at IBM, Sun, and elsewhere to try to bask in the reflected glow of all the SL hype, shame on them. They should have known better. Their money was wasted on cynical efforts to tie their stars to what is soon to be roadkill on the info superhighway. SL will be a victim of the next big thing, Gen Y will move on, and the marketers will scamper quickly behind them, trying to be cool. All the while, squandering shareholders’ money. Oh well… -
John LaBouff said:
an absolutely absurd number of typos for a supposedly journalistic publication
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Matt Marshall said:
yowza, grammar corrected!
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dprawel said:
SL is a neat social experiment, but little else. The members of SL are not people who are looking to buy anything bigger than a breadbox (cost or size), and have little money to buy much of anything. They are there to socialize. There is a big future in 3D and n-D but if one wants to buy sneakers, why not just go to Nike.com?
My $0.02… -
Sundog Sakai said:
I doubt very much that Lee Dierdorf speaks for IBM. Not to downplay Mr. Dierdorf but there’s no shortage of VP’s at IBM. In the end what speaks volumes is IBM’s CEO’s statement that they are spending over $100 million on Second Life and related Virtual world technologies.
As for Mr. Churbuck, well, I think that Rich cut to the heart of that pretty effectively.
What really matters is that 3D worlds like Second Life take the focus off of the products being pushed and put it on the interactions between members of communities. Big companies like IBM have a lot to fear from communities that they don’t control.
This cat is out of the bag… SL is doubling in size every 6 months and there’s not much that can be done to stop it. SL has open sourced their client app and will open source their server soon. SL is to the web as television and radio were to print.
Get with the times and stop taking pot shots at thing you don’t understand.
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Artist3d said:
It is all a matter of perspective and nothing beats the 3D internet for meeting and talking in real time and with that sense of presence you get when you are standing right next to a person 3000 miles away from the comfort of your home computer! Active Worlds with over 700 3D theme worlds has been quietly growing real virtual realities for over 10 years and Second Life is but a wonderful commercial off-shoot of that original community-minded venture. It is all moving towards global networking on a scale of real-time interactivity hitherto unimagined!!! Watch and learn. The 2D Internet will become merely a glorified Yellow Pages used as a reference from within the 3D Universes of tomorrow.
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Saturday Post said:
When David Charbruck of Lenovo says: “There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid.” he belies the fact that David Charbruck couldn’t find anything to do in Second Life besides trying to get laid. Good luck with that, David.
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