Maybe not failed as such, but I'd agree with the author that SL tech has suffered an apparent stagnation for a quite a while now. Indeed there has been a long f

Maybe not failed as such, but I'd agree with the author that SL tech has suffered an apparent stagnation for a quite a while now. Indeed there has been a long festering complaint on SecondLife forums that Linden Lab has added various sugary features without addressing core performance concerns. This may or may not be fair, but that seems to be the general impression. Large draw distances, high particle & script counts and more than a few dozen avatars in a single region all tend to result in poor performance and user experience. And the platform appears to be quite sensitive to the usual concerns of bandwidth and GPU. As a longtime SL user I'm not surprised at the issues described by the author. Linden Lab itself has seen a number of shaky management changes (founder + CTO out, new CEO, founder back, founder out again, etc) and this may have taken some toll on engineering efficacy. That being said, I think that innovation on the SecondLife platform will be forced by pressure from the furiously advancing OpenSim project, an open source, reverse-engineered version of the SL "backend" that is usually described as "the Apache of the open metaverse". http://opensimulator.org/ http://opensimulator.org/ Basically, SecondLife, though filled with an amazing amount of wonderful art, code and creativity, won't last another 8 years without somehow opening up and keeping up with the explosion happening just outside its walled garden.