I sat through every single keynote speech at this year’s IDF in San Francisco. They ranged in quality and content, from Paul Otellini’s well structured and fast paced discussion of the inevitable progress of high-end technology into the mainstream, to Gordon Moore’s interesting and humorous interview, to Renee James’ forced, dying comedy presented to an exhausted audience. Nothing deflates a fledgling software line better.
But by far the most insipid keynote was the final one. Justin Rattner, normally a perfectly pleasant individual who we have no problem listening to, began his keynote from within Second Life. If this wasn’t cheesy enough, he then emerged onto the San Francisco stage wearing – gasp – the same eye-bleedingly hideous shirt his Second Life avatar had donned, and proceeded to spout reams of unmitigated nonsense about the future of the ‘3D web’.
First up was a biased graph, showing that Second Life (in particular) is officially better than sites like MySpace and YouTube because, well, it’s in 3D! And it’s completely user created! Isn’t that great? NO! I’m not sure what sort of exposure Mr Rattner has actually had to the world of Second Life, but it seems the majority of those Terabytes of user created content are particularly phallic.
Moving on, we were shown undeniable proof of Second Life’s ability for free expression; Italian IBM employees, facing a pay cut of over $1000 per month, staked out IBM’s own SL-installation with anti-establishment placards. Well, I use the plural, but perhaps the singular is more appropriate: what we were actually show was a screen shot of one chap, standing on his own in the deserted IBM virtual office, with a virtual placard being seen by approximately nobody. Would this protest have been quite as effective if someone hadn’t posted a screenshot to the apparently archaic 2D web? No!
Rattner also had words for World of Warcraft and its ilk: “Massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Who came up with that? It sounds like it came from the Intel marketing department, doesn't it? It's just what Intel would call it, you know, and everybody would go, ‘What the heck? Can't you just call it an online game?’” Well no, Justin. There’s a perfectly good reason there are so many words there, and one is the avoidance of ambiguity that Intel does indeed seem fond of. Does ‘online game’ say ‘multiplayer’ to you? Does ‘multiplayer’ say 2 players or 100,000? It’s OK, you can just say ‘MMO’.
And then – as if it couldn’t get any more insipid – the presentation fell off a cliff. First up a representative of Qwak was brought to the stage. If you haven’t heard of it, Qwak is an SL-esque virtual world, apparently built to satisfy the enormous demand for jerky 3D avatars and awkward movement that exists in the business sector. A demo chugged away, showing how Qwak could switch to different 2D enterprise apps with ease, and incorporate recursive links so that a user could, for instance, burrow down to solve particular problems. What was really proven was that the 3D element was utterly and indisputably pointless, merely adding a layer of complexity and processor drain on top of what might otherwise be a fairly efficient business flow.
Then Rattner did a comparison of hardware requirements and cynically proved beyond a doubt why Intel is particularly interested in Second Life; server load. SL servers, thanks to the completely user-creatable nature of the game, can each house perhaps a couple of hundred users at a time, compared to a few thousand for WOW’s pre-defined world, and hundreds of thousands for a traditional web page. To us, that says that SL in inefficient, clumsy, and simply wasteful; if we wanted to work, we would do it in the unbroken world of 2D applications, not the broken land of Second Life. To Intel, the more users make it into Second Life, the more processors it sells – simple.
I don’t mean to be mean to Mr Rattner. He did his best, and I’m sure his enthusiasm for the evolution of the web isn’t quite as narrow as an interest in selling processors. But SL and Qwak clearly are not the way forward. Maybe when we have unlimited processor power and shiny lenticular monitors the 3D web will have a real place. For now, it’s the home of certain games, the home of a tiny little geek community, and something for people who are interested in efficiency to avoid at all costs.
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