IBM to host private Second Life regions

Reuters is reporting that IBM and Linden Labs have struck a deal that lets IBM host its own Second Life regions:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM said on Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.

The project is in testing and will go live within several weeks. It marks a new focus by Second Life's parent company, Linden Lab, on providing software and services to corporate customers who want to use the virtual world for collaboration and teleconferencing.

This is bigger news than it might appear on the surface. This is the beginning of creating a grid of interconnected and interoperable servers. Just like the Web. The World Wide Web consists of 165 million servers, and continues to grow. If virtual worlds are to follow the same path, and I believe they will, then today's move by Linden and IBM is a significant step in that direction.

Linden has already open-sourced the client-- think Firefox. They have indicated their intentions to open-source the server software-- think Apache. This move today is a massive step towards solving the interoperability issues, and is a first move towards massive scaling. When these two issues are solved, the demand for virtual worlds is going to explode to a level comparable to what we have seen with the Web. This agreement between Linden Labs and IBM is a big deal.

QOTD: Dave Johnson on the Yahoo layoffs

From David Johnson at Lost Remote commenting on the expected layoffs at Yahoo: Yahoo looks at cutting hundreds of jobs

Is it ironic that Yahoo positioned itself as the ultimate content aggregator online, co-opting newspaper publishing strategies and partnering with the newspaper industry, and now is laying off staff like newspapers are doing nationwide?

If your business is content you need to be paying close attention. Yahoo defined content production in the Web of old. This is a lesson in scale. You can't begin to throw enough people at the problem.

QOTD: David Weinberger on scale

David Weinberger from Harvard Business: The Year of Scale

Management by control just can't work in a scaled world. In fact, it was only by removing control that the online world was able to scale.

I'm going to be blogging a lot more on the topic of scale this year. An inability to scale is where most good ideas fail, and it is something that few people give serious consideration. We do "things" because we can, but rarely think about might happen when the demand for those "things" increases exponentially.

Where most projects fail is Google's strength

I've been thinking about scale a lot of late. I can't tell you the number of nifty little pieces of software that I've seen over the years, where people thought they'd stumbled upon the holy grail, only to fail miserably. In almost every situation the failure was people's inability to understand what it takes for something to scale. People don't ask themselves the single most important question. It's right here in the latest Newsweek: Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

One simple question. That's all it took for Christophe Bisciglia to bewilder confident job applicants at Google (GOOG). Bisciglia, an angular 27-year-old senior software engineer with long wavy hair, wanted to see if these undergrads were ready to think like Googlers. "Tell me," he'd say, "what would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?"

What a strange idea. If they returned to their school projects and were foolish enough to cram formulas with a thousand times more details about shopping or maps or—heaven forbid—with video files, they'd slow their college servers to a crawl.

At that point in the interview, Bisciglia would explain his question. To thrive at Google, he told them, they would have to learn to work—and to dream—on a vastly larger scale.

Yep, great question. Very few people think of the consequences of success. I will be discussing this some more over the next couple of weeks.

TurboTax failure

For four hours last night I tried to file my taxes electronically using Intuit's TurboTax online service. The service was down and it was impossible to submit. Their error message actually told us they were experiencing too much traffic, and that we should try coming back on April 17 and try again between 4am and 4pm. Being that it was already 8pm that might have been a tad difficult. I haven't quite mastered my time travel.

I've filed electronically through TurboTax for several years, and being an IT person perhaps I place more faith in these systems being properly engineered than I should. Actually, I should know better. BUT, you don't expect a service the size of Intuit to have underestimated the potential load on their servers. Actually, they should know exactly the load to expect. It's not like they are a start-up trying to refine their software and experiencing unexpected surges in traffic. So, this is not the sort of massive failure that should be tolerated.

The company's spokeperson had this to say about their problem:

The Mountain View-based company contacted the IRS to alert the agency to the backlog, Pforzheimer said. While stopping short of promising that filers whose returns fail to reach the government before the deadline would not be penalized, he said, "it's fair to say the IRS understands what the situation is" and would have a statement about the situation Wednesday.

"Don't wait until the last minute is the moral of the story," he said.

You have got to me kidding me! Let me speculate that Mr Pforzheimer will not survive in his current position for much longer. I would suggest that perhaps he should have taken Yehuda Berlinger's advice on how to issue a proper apology, and in this instance he should be talking specifically about what they will be doing to make amends to affected customers. Here's some free advice for Mr. Pforzheimer, WHEN YOU SCREW UP DO NOT TRY TO PLACE THE BLAME ON THE PEOPLE YOU HAVE HARMED!

If you want to see a corporate marketing problem of unbelievable proportions check out Intuit's customer forums. I'm sure they never imagined their forums being used to bash the company in this way. So much for radical transparency. Here's a taste:

IntuitSucksAss

Advice:

1. Dispute the charge
2. Tell everyone you know and blog online
3. Sell Intuit stock short tomorrow, I suspect it will go down
4. Talk to a lawyer about a class action lawsuit
5. Use other software next year
6. Don't upgrade Quicken (it rarely adds anything) or goto Microsoft Money (does the same exact stuff)

Have to love it!

I ended up giving up on Intuit and paid my taxes using Offical Payments. It worked nicely, but cost me an additional $104. Did I mention that Intuit charged me twice for filing even though it never actually worked? I'll be looking for my refund check from Intuit, and for another service to use next year.