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Hurling the Sledgehammer
Jan. 28th, 2011 04:34 pmEvery time a shiny new virtual world shows up and the geekosphere starts circling and rubbing their hands and predicting the doom of Second Life, I see the same thing happen.
I watched it happen to Lively, to There and now even Blue Mars is abandoning any further development of its PC client and shifting to a mobile platform.
They each have one flaw, a flaw that is to all appearances fatal.
I can't get in.
I'm a Mac user. I always have been. Our family's first computer was an Apple, we were probably the first on our block with a little beige box in 1984 and we've been Mac people ever since.
About twelve percent of American households have a Mac in them as of 2009. The majority of those have some kind of Windows-based PC lurking about somewhere, so it wouldn't seem necessary to go to all the trouble to make a virtual world client specifically for Mac users. There are so few of us, after all, in the larger scheme of things.
Except for the fact that it isn't just about numbers. It's about the kind of users you cut out by shutting the door on the Macintosh.
The affluent type. The college-educated type. The artsy, creative, I-make-my-living-conjuring-pretty-things-out-of-pixels type.
Photoshop, the program most commonly used for editing Second Life textures, started out on the Macintosh and didn't have a Windows version until after a few years of development. It's a pretty safe bet that a large number of Photoshop experts are Mac people, and if you don't have a way for them to get in, you cut yourself off from a deep pool of creative talent. Not all of them will go to the trouble to either obtain a Windows machine or force their Mac to mimic one just to access a program. Why on earth should they, when they already have Second Life if they need a world to play in?
In fact, I'll go out on a limb and firmly declare that any virtual world that cannot be readily accessed by a Macintosh computer will never successfully surpass Second Life.
I'm not sure where Blue Mars goes on that scale, to be honest, considering that the direction they're heading towards is . . . the iPhone and iPad.
Yeah.
I think that says it all, really.
I watched it happen to Lively, to There and now even Blue Mars is abandoning any further development of its PC client and shifting to a mobile platform.
They each have one flaw, a flaw that is to all appearances fatal.
I can't get in.
I'm a Mac user. I always have been. Our family's first computer was an Apple, we were probably the first on our block with a little beige box in 1984 and we've been Mac people ever since.
About twelve percent of American households have a Mac in them as of 2009. The majority of those have some kind of Windows-based PC lurking about somewhere, so it wouldn't seem necessary to go to all the trouble to make a virtual world client specifically for Mac users. There are so few of us, after all, in the larger scheme of things.
Except for the fact that it isn't just about numbers. It's about the kind of users you cut out by shutting the door on the Macintosh.
The affluent type. The college-educated type. The artsy, creative, I-make-my-living-conjuring-pretty-things-out-of-pixels type.
Photoshop, the program most commonly used for editing Second Life textures, started out on the Macintosh and didn't have a Windows version until after a few years of development. It's a pretty safe bet that a large number of Photoshop experts are Mac people, and if you don't have a way for them to get in, you cut yourself off from a deep pool of creative talent. Not all of them will go to the trouble to either obtain a Windows machine or force their Mac to mimic one just to access a program. Why on earth should they, when they already have Second Life if they need a world to play in?
In fact, I'll go out on a limb and firmly declare that any virtual world that cannot be readily accessed by a Macintosh computer will never successfully surpass Second Life.
I'm not sure where Blue Mars goes on that scale, to be honest, considering that the direction they're heading towards is . . . the iPhone and iPad.
Yeah.
I think that says it all, really.
