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Microsoft Rumored To Buy Second Life
Jamie noticed a rumor making the rounds: Microsoft buying Second Life. Nobody is confirming or denying anything, much less announcing anything sounding like a price. Or a reason why this makes any sense to anyone.
No confirmation, no denials, no explanation, no reason to believe it at all... ...and this is news?
They need it to compete with the runaway critical and commercial success of Playstation Home.
Wouldn't that imply they had a first?
The only reason I can think of is they want to pick up any patents they own and sue people. Perhaps I'm bitter ... it seems that's the only reason companies get bought these days.
[
...because Bill Gates wants to make his Linden dollar purchases for "Gorean" equipment deductible?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Maybe they're only buying it inside Second Life.
don't care
Hell, I'm even surprised that second life is still up and running considering the collective ADD that 'net users demonstrate
Wherever You Go, There You Are
See this is what happens when you tell some guys with billions of dollars to "go get a life"..... I know it sounds like a crazy scheme but then they laughed at Microsoft Bob too... Uh, wait....
The code base for the viewer is GPL, but they have certain terms you must meet before the viewer can connect to the servers. Would MS change those terms to lock out Linux (or MacIntosh)?
Microsoft is purchasing this in anticipation of starting a virtual brothel in Xbox Live. Subscribers will be able to pay real money to participate in virtual (fake) sex acts with complete strangers.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
I mean, most of them never get to see the wife and kids ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm betting Microsoft is seeing the money they can make from furries.
I had an SL avatar, ran it into a furry hangout, oh look, a stripper pole. I get on it, leave to take care of something that needed urgent attention, come back and I've suddenly got the equivalent of $50USD.
I didn't do a damned thing and made $50. Furries are unusually un-thrifty with their money, it seems.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No, no... the rumor is all wrong. MS is trying to buy "A Second Life".
Unfortunately, didn't Gates & Ballmer sell their souls' to the Devil along time ago?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Microsoft was once a hugely internally competitive company, one that favored the absolute hot dog. The person that could write code and deliver code faster than anyone else (who cares if it can be understood as long as it was written with Hungarian Notation). Obviously some things have changed in the 15 or so years since I was there. Still, this environment is increasingly ineffective as software complexity goes up by leaps and bounds, and their ability to reward working in such a crappy, loner, dog eat dog fashion has passed away long ago.
So Microsoft (like IBM, Oracle, and many others) buy innovation rather than do innovation.
It doesn't really matter that Second Life doesn't blend with anything Microsoft has. It does matter that they do *something* innovative. They have been in a hugely dry spell for a long long time (technically speaking). Maybe it has been so dry that virtual worlds look promising to Microsoft management? Maybe they see injecting more power into virtual worlds with the increasing processing power of portable devices (smart phones, net books, etc. fused with LED projectors and virtual input technologies)?
two words:
Patent
Portfolio
They've been rumored to be active in one of the open-source secondlife clones for a while now, so it's not a matter of wanting the access. Secondlife has been thoroughly, totally mismanaged for years so it's not the expertise (besides, didn't they just lay off most of their employees?).
There's only one, single thing that they would gain from this purchase; and it's so obvious that I'm literally shocked no one has mentioned it yet.
They want the patent portfolio, so that they can shut down any competing open source clones and prevent anyone else from operating in that space.
or to organise virtual chat lobbies on MSN live, whose quality and relevance could even reach Microsoft Bob levels.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I recall ye olden days when second life was first released, it was the first software I was aware of that required something "more than W98". I believe it required W2K or higher, in an era when "all" games etc worked just fine on W98. So I didn't bother using SL for a few years.
Possibly the idea is to hack up SL until it wont work on anything except vista or something post-vista... Otherwise why would anyone upgrade their OS, other than the usual monopoly market manipulations...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Home has turned out to be a massive success for Sony. Microsoft has to do something because right now their online service is getting laughed at by gamers:
* Forced 50 dollar a year online fees
* Laggy P2P based networking for games
* Tiny online game sizes because of the horrible P2P networking tech
* Their creepy ripoff of Nintendo's Mii avatars
Compared to Sony's:
* Free online gaming for every single player
* Standard dedicated servers for all major games just like in PC gaming
* Gigantic player counts for online games thanks to the dedicated servers
* The massive Home online service
Home is absolutely packed with people at all hours of the day with almost every person spending money constantly on Home items for their characters and personal spaces. The amount of money Sony is making off of the Home service is huge when you add up just low estimates for what people are buying every month.
Sony has been working on Home since the early PS2 days. Combined with their long history of experience in MMORPG tech and development it is going to be basically impossible for Microsoft to take Second Life and turn it into anything that can compete with Home.
From what ive heard on the SecondLife Beta group this is laughable at best
Why would MicroSoft want to buy a company that
1 has massive LINUX installs (the SL grid farms)
2 is running about 3 minutes from being sued into a crater 85% of the time
3 has nothing that a company like MS needs or wants (the L$Mega types most likely HATE microsoft)
Now the whole Mesh beta thing is lots more interesting
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
For either company.
And shall the recursive jokes ensue ...
It's probably not such a bad idea really. Microsoft are seen as boring, stagnant, and not making any particularly exciting moves in terms of new ideas & new products. Second Life is terrible these days, boring, clunky, ugly and crap, but the fundamental idea is pretty incredible - if Microsoft could take what's there and build upon it/somethow breath some life into it, I reckon it could have some serious potential, a second life if you will. It'll be spare change for MS, so not such a bad gamble IMO.
They'll probably integrate it with that annoying new Xbox gadget. The virtual whores in SL will be thrilled!
Failure is entering a market and then not turning a profit from it
Massive failure is repeatedly attempting and then cancelling your own entry into a market
Microsoft is doing the massive failure, then giving up and buying a product that's currently failing
Off topic, but has anyone else started getting ads from the BSA on Slashdot?
I finally bothered to click the disable advertising checkbox because of it.
After all, they've been showering people with software-penises since the late 1980s.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
It seems IBM is a big player/user in Second Life. They even have a corporate client for Second Life.
http://ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-social-secondlife/index.html
From this link:
Meetig, collaborating, and brainstorming in a virtual world
Global Innovation Outlook at IBM dives into Second Life ....
"Our USC participants were impressed by the interactive nature of the GIO Conference. The tools and approach inspired us to re-examine how we use our own Second Life environment," Jerry Whitfield, associate director, Marshall School of Business, said.
Virtual worlds are good for many things. They are great places to escape from reality for a while, wear outrageous clothes, or meet a complete stranger from around the world. But as IBM's Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) team (see Resources) found out last month, virtual worlds are also a great place to host a very real-world, business-oriented roundtable discussion.
There are a bunch of developerWorks articles about Second Life, like: www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-second-life-1.html - Second Life client, Part 1: Hacking Second Life..
Why would MicroSoft want to buy a company that
1 has massive LINUX installs (the SL grid farms)
2 is running about 3 minutes from being sued into a crater 85% of the time
3 has nothing that a company like MS needs or wants (the L$Mega types most likely HATE microsoft)
Hotmail.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
they got confused when they saw all of that embracing and extending going on in the virtual space of Second Life.
That was cruel, when you said that the Furries first came to mind, and then shortly after than visuals of the embracing and extending you mentioned...
Thanks a lot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Facebook is rumored to buy NASA, and IBM rumored to buy Sweden..
Microsoft can't fix Windows for real, so maybe they'll try in SL.
I can see a great new UI paradigm that couples Surface with 2nd Life, maybe. Maybe Microsoft (finally) has a new trick up their sleeve. Or they are simply illustrating yet again how cutting edge they are ten years ago. I dunno...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Home is massive. The amount of work Sony has put into it over the years is enormous. A full MMORPG style gaming engine. Media streaming tech and servers. Integration with games and the PS3 system software. Huge amounts of tools and processes for adding content from Sony themselves and vast numbers of third parties.
Microsoft would have to spend years coming up with anything remotely similar. I have a hard time imagining they are really going to try to come up with a copy of Sony's Home. There is burning anger from the humiliation the huge success Sony has had with Home both from the gigantic userbase and enormous support from third party gaming companies.
But everything at Microsoft points to them no longer really trying to compete with Sony and the PS3 and instead have given up and turned to trying to turn the old Xbox 360 hardware into a Wii type device. They have been closing down internal studios and other internal Xbox related teams for the past two years. They now only have about 3 first party studios. Suddenly ramping up the resources and personnel to try to create an answer to Sony's enormous Home online world just doesn't make sense. Whatever they come up with is going to be so late and rushed that it is going to just look like junk in comparison.
Wait a minute, Microsoft does something that doesn't make sense? Where should I even start??? Hey I'm still waiting for them to try to buy AOL. They must have a whole division for tired brands they've bought.
everyone knows that Microsoft doesn't like its current life and wants a new one. Unfortunately, second life only allows actual people to play, so for Microsoft to be able to play as a corporation, they would have to buy it first and change the rules. Isn't that obvious?
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
I'm looking at this two ways: What could MS use SL technology for?
It's more of, "how can Microsoft push its agendas better by buying SL?" Here is how.
.NET on Windows Server. This would be somewhat like switching Hotmail to Windows (which did not go at all smoothly...). The overall goal would be to kill off the existing SL server code, and position OpenSim as the 'Apache of virtual worlds'. And that Apache happens to run much better on .NET/WIndows Server than Mono/Linux (simply because Mono's performance is much poorer than .NET - the OpenSim developers complain about this). For this reason it was not the best decision to write OpenSim in C#.
Currently the SL main grid runs on Linux servers, with Mono powering the scripting engine. However, there is an open source reverse-engineered replacement server for the official SL servers, called OpenSim. OpenSim is written in C#, and has gotten some support and interest from Microsoft. You can currently only use the official servers in the SL main grid, while people outside tinker with OpenSim.
Microsoft can buy SL, scrap all those Linux servers and the official SL server code, and switch it all to OpenSim on
So, if virtual worlds take off and become a huge market, Windows Server will be in a position to gain. Will that actually happen? Who knows. But it's worth a few million $ to Microsoft, they made that in the time it took me to write this comment.
Second Life has jumped the shark.
And people still use it?
Support SETI@home
...that gets all the big names-- but only when they're embarrassingly past their prime.
It may only be a rumor, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turned out to be true.
..oh. its a flying penis.
MS buying Second Life is actually so fucking wacky an idea, it can only come to pass.
For sure, theres money in them there virtuals. For someone. Eventually.
Other rumor sites say that Microsoft only became interested in SecondLife after talks fell through to buy Lives #2 through #9 from M.O.M.C.A.T. Industries. Sources claim that M.O.M.C.A.T. wanted the deal-breaking price of 999 cans of tuna.
XBox.
XBox Live avatar world, like a virtual world with social networking built in. Sidestep gains from any other social network by making it unique (virtual environment) and exclusive (XBox Live).
But why doesn't he at least respond to the allegations? Did Rob Malda smoke a cock in 1990 or did he not?
Second Life still exists???
Or a sad attempt to pump up the stock of Linden Labs. I haven't been able to find a listing/history, can anyone else confirm whether it jumped?
It's a reference to pranks like this on SL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv6tr3SvmIY
or more particularly, this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RedLyae4b2s
Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn't have points, or scores, it doesn't have winners or losers. -- Dwight
Oh it has losers... -- Jim
Not to mention missing out on the privilege of playing with people like you.
How DOES he live with himself?
As an avid Second Life loser I don't think MS could bring anything good to SL. Their best inovation consists of something like Clippy, everything else they buy and fuck up but by weight of market share saddle most of us with their substandard offerings (except Word and Excel which are the best in class still.)
Apple would be a much better fit, or even Google. Both of those places get it.
- "Horatio Easterwood"
If you're looking for a reason, that's a pretty good one.
Integrating Second Life into Xbox Live makes all kinds of sense if MS wants to compete in the 'virtual space' marketplace.
I doubt there is any burning anger over at MS directed towards Sony. They should be happy that they are in second and that they have a yearly revenue stream from millions of people. XBox is an investment that they would love to duplicate with their other consumer devices. XBox also keeps the company in the news.
I think maybe you are a troll or your post was very acute sarcasm. Sony just released their Wii copycat controllers. At least MS has an innovative motion control scheme.
What is funny is that both companies, and Nintendo as well, can make money and provide great products. Sony is seeding BluRay, so it is hard to argue with their strategy. MS is in a surprising second in console sales, close to the top in game sales and undoubtably number one in subscription revenues.
I'm looking forward to the PC version of kinnect as I do not own an XBox.
The original source of this rumor is the Twitter account of an individual permanently banned from Second Life for, among other things, stalking another player to his real-life home and threatening him. (At least, that's how I understand it.) The only thing that gives it a shred of credibility is that Linden Lab won't come out and deny it.
> Except that Clippy will be replaced with a swarm of flying dildos.
It's not much of an improvement, but it's a start...
I was wondering why microsoft has stopped developing their own games and instead went into franchising game sales. I think it would be better that they start with creating their operating systems bug free. I got my laptop that came with their OS and you get only the repair/restore disk. eventually I screwed my whole system up after several restores and I have to use Linux on it. What a waste! Then I have to find another site to help me with laptop hard drive replacement. What a pain and what a waste!!
I RIDE FLYING COCKS!
-"Horatio Easterwood"
Hi, I think you're confused. This is Slashdot. GameFAQs is way over that way. Maybe along the way you can learn some maturity, or at least get over your obsession with the Xbox 360 and homosexuality.
While you're at it, please put your balls in a vise, clamp it tight, and then do a few spins. The 21st century doesn't need you breeding.
The one thing I learned from the news coverage about Second Life:
The plural of "dildo".
Let me guess... they are gonna rename it to Second Live ?
Assuming that this indeed is true, my guess is that they want the technology to develop their own MMO or use Linden's expertise for their cloud based offerings.
Buying the tech and expertise is cheaper than developping your own after all.
~Syberz
The 21st century doesn't need you breeding.
This applies to everyone.
"M$, pls go."
"No."
Or it might be a semi-april fools joke...you know we are six month out and six month in from fools day :)
....the only good that could come out of this is a scenario where microsoft buys "Second Death" and then, after wasting lots of time and money, scraps the whole thing. I really just hope that the Danish government/towns/councils etc. don't waste money on the crap, like they did the first time.
I'm in the tech industry, I play video games, I have a PS3, four Macs and three PCs, I'm 40 and have teenaged children...I'm no recluse, yet I've NEVER seen Second Life except in an episode of The Office. I've also never seen The Sims. I'm beginning to think there's some sort of ratings conspiracy to hype up products that don't really exist.
The word on the street is this is a rumor off of a tweet, from one of the big massive trolls that was banned from Second life a while back. The site doing the reporting put stock in someone who has been foaming at the mouth for ages.
Basic journalism says "Find me a credible source, not just some jackass with an axe to grind."
Maybe M$ just want to stick to the plot of Caprica?
And after much research, here's my reply to this rumor.