Mitch Kapor's SL5 keynote and the Linden Prize

Several minutes ago, Mitch Kapor gave his closing keynote for Second Life's fifth anniversary event (never mind that technically it wasn't a keynote, by definition). The topic was announced to be Second Life as a disruptive technology platform.

Since the announcement of this speech, we've been asked frequently what disruptive technology actually means. After all, it is a term not in very wide circulation, and most disruptive technologies have failed to succeed. The ones that you may be familiar with are the success stories -- the very few that actually survived.

So, we'll quickly explain the term, and then go back to Kapor.

New technologies are generally broadly categorized into three groups: sustaining, revolutionary and disruptive. Technically, we here at Massively, don't necessarily agree with this categorization, however this is how the terms are used in business markets, and as such provide an important contextual background for understanding Kapor's speech.

A sustaining technology generally provides an improvement. Think of just about any appliance you have around the house. They've been getting steadily better, and frequently cheaper compared to the expensive, clunky things you had if you had one when they first came onto the market. Those are sustaining technologies. Sustaining technologies are commonplace. Your microwave, washing machine, and shoes are all sustaining technologies.

A revolutionary technology generally has some hitherto unseen and desirable feature that hasn't been in the market before and represent a huge jump in consumer/user value, and people tend to adopt the products with the revolutionary technology. Revolutionary technologies are rare. The Sony Walkman was a revolutionary technology.

A disruptive technology is one that disrupts an entire industry or market, throwing them into disarray and often into panic. Disruptive technologies are quite rare, and fail more often than not. The automobile in its time was a disruptive technology, as was the desktop computer, television, the telephone and the steamship.

Disruptive technologies come in several flavors. Some serve the needs or desires of a portion of the market which is simply not catered to by existing companies and products -- quite often, these end up falling into the revolutionary technology category.

The most common disruptive technologies are products or services that focus on serving the least profitable customer (at least, the least profitable to incumbent vendors), and delivering to them a product or service that is barely acceptable (either in features, performance or cost). The vendor then expands the market by edging upwards into that portion of the market where people are willing to pay a little more for improved service or innovation.

Usually, other vendors do not bother much about the early intrusion of vendors in this class, as they often fail, and the customers that the newcomer is taking are broadly unprofitable to (or unserviceable by) the existing vendors in any case -- the customers that are taken are simply not potential customers of the incumbents, except by the most extreme stretches of the imagination.

However, disruptive technologies that succeed are those that keep moving upwards through the market, slowly absorbing an increasing percentage of the profitable portion of the market, and progressively starving incumbent vendors within the industry.

Technically, it's hard to say for sure which of these three categories Second Life actually falls into. In one sense it seems to be a largely generational increment on virtual worlds (both graphical and text-based) of the past, that provided one form or another of user-created content and scripting. This would, on the surface, qualify it as a sustaining technology.

Second Life's co-opting of the classic virtual world grid to encompass distributed database systems and grid-computing is, however, strongly redolent of a revolutionary technology.

As for disruptive? The user-created-content and economic model seems to edge into this category, although we're not quite convinced that we've genuinely crossed out of the revolutionary into the disruptive, but we'll give it the benefit of the doubt for the time being. We're not really sure whose market, exactly is being disrupted, and that is rather a key criterion.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen coined the term disruptive technology to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology. If Second Life is a disruptive technology, whose market is it that is being disrupted by it and what technology is being displaced? If there isn't one, then Second Life is sustaining or revolutionary, but not disruptive.

Kapor doesn't actually say, during his speech -- disruptive and disruption is somewhere in the future, he says during the introduction. The next while is taken up with explaining ... well, what more or less everyone who uses Second Life actually already knows -- specifically the various things that people are doing with and through it.

'It's still ... a frontier world. And frontier life ... is challenging,' observes Kapor, leading in to the fairly well-established point that human behavior is human behavior everywhere. How people behave in Second Life isn't a function of Second Life, of course, it is a function of people.

Despite the well-worn track of much of this material, Kapor is well-spoken and the audio and transcript are worth the time to hear his perspective, even though we've heard the material of the first 20 minutes over and over previously.

Kapor believes that we're at the end of the early-adopter phase and at the beginning of the pragmatic adoption phase. We don't suppose he can be blamed for that observation, but it appears to us that Second Life rushed past that point approximately two years ago. Perhaps you have a rather different view, but we ourselves haven't seen terribly many early adopters coming in in the last year or two.

There's a strong implication that rules may be tightened as the platform comes out of that "frontier phase."

Kapor segues smoothly from his strong dislike of text-based communication and his support for voice to the addition of body language, via a 3D Camera interface which gets a look in with a short video of expressions, and another on movement. [Links require quicktime and we're not sure how long those will stay working] We certainly didn't think he'd make it to the end of the speech without some focus on the 3D camera.

The final item is the announcement. The Linden Prize. US$10,000 (paid in Linden Dollars, which as you all probably have been told by Terms of Service and Linden Staff by now by now are a limited license, and not real money -- ToS 1.4) once per year for 'superlative achievement exemplifying the mission "elevating the human condition" through using Second Life.'

Little additional detail was available beyond that at the session, as Kapor's speech came to an abrupt close.

The award is ... interesting, but feels mostly like grandstanding. US$10,000 paid in Linden Dollars seems little more than a token PR outlay. A comparatively microscopic marketing budget for something that will bring Linden Lab quite a bit of press, year after year -- while Linden Lab is actually not spending any actual cash on the prize at all, beyond any organizational outlays.

On the whole, nothing really much to see here, for all the buildup, though Kapor presented quite well. Not that we were expecting anything genuinely exciting, but we were hopeful, nonetheless.