Linden Lab sets terror-alert level to 'Google'

Linden Lab certainly showed signs of fear when Google's Lively kicked off its public beta. Now we're seeing signs more akin to terror, panic or desperation. 'Who wouldn't be concerned when Google comes after their business?' said new Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon to Bloomberg.

Given recent changes and marketing pushes, you can see Linden Lab's management showing a sheen of sweat. Curiously, it seems that Google isn't after Linden Lab's business -- Lively's certainly no competitor to the business that Linden Lab has. However, what Google represents seems to be a threat to the business that Linden Lab wants to have.

This week saw the hiring of Frank Ambrose (AOL's head of technology for infrastructure and network services for a decade) as Senior VP of global technology. While Ambrose has more tech knowledge than the average suit in his position, his primary competencies seem to be negotiations, coordination, contracts and costs -- which all marries up nicely with Linden Lab making a push into corporate, government and military sales, and hiring additional staff to do just that. We're not sure what they're going to be selling, exactly, but virtual environment meeting spaces are probably right at the top of the list.

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This presents a marked change of direction for Linden Lab who have traditionally avoided any relationship with their business-customers while celebrating a more or less undirected aggregation of individual users. In recent months, however, Linden Lab has been adapting their presentation, increasingly talking down the value and contributions of individual users of the service, and talking up corporations, non-profits, and charities -- of whom they were once dismissive and distant.

While the 275-person privately held company is profitable, just how profitable they are depends on who you ask. Board members and most Linden executives suggest "sort of" profitability, while Linden Lab CFO John Zdanowski suggests that Linden Lab is wildly, gaily, insanely profitable in terms usually only used by those who are being dazed by the tintinnabulation of cash-registers.

As for how well the service is growing, that's another matter for debate. Kingdon says that growth has been slowing for quite a while -- while other watchers of key metrics suggest that growth has stalled, or that there's actually some shrinkage. A lot of that comes down to quite how you define growth. The numbers can be interepreted in a variety of ways -- just how you slice the words and define the exact meaning of 'growth' makes all the difference.

Whether it is terror at the advent of Google's Lively service, a long-planned course charted on Linden Lab's secret strategic roadmap, or a new direction brought in by Kingdon, it seems clear that the goals of Linden Lab are increasingly tenuously aligned with those of the service's existing users.

That's alright, though. If Linden Lab can rekindle its growth (or "supercharge that growth", as Kingdon puts it), then it doesn't actually need its existing users.