I was flabbergasted to read that Gartner projects that 70% of organizations will develop a private internal virtual world by 2012.
Search engine optimization is a stretch for many companies, never mind Web 2.0 like Twitter and MySpace. I just cannot see how such a large number of organizations are suddenly going to embrace virtual words. Especially when Gartner’s own research shows that nine out of 10 corporate attempts to use virtual worlds fail within the first 18 months.
But according to Gartner, corporate virtual world projects often fail because they were launched for the wrong reasons—for the cool factor, or simply to keep up with competitors. But the biggest stumbling block may be a fundamental lack of understanding as to why virtual worlds stand apart from the 2-D Internet.
“Virtual worlds mark the transition from Web pages to Web places, and a successful virtual presence starts with people, not physics,” said Gartner vice president Steve Prentice, in a statement. “Realistic graphics and physical behavior count for little unless the presence is valued by and engaging to a large audience.”
Sorry Steve, but I do not buy it. I cannot seeing that 90% failure rate turning into a 75% success rate in the next 4 years. It is not going to happen.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Dan Thornton 05.21.08 at 7:19 am
I totally agree. Despite the success of World of Warcraft and Second Life to entice early adopters into virtual worlds, I don’t believe the mainstream public will hit virtual worlds until the Grand Theft Auto brand name brings them via consoles and PCs. (http://thewayoftheweb.net/?p=228)
And businesses won’t be there for more than limited PR until the mainstream start to arrive. Most public facing companies seem to either join for a PR stunt, or struggle to make the conceptual leap e.g. real world fashion houses duplicating real world clothes and getting outsold by SL fashion creators doing things more suitable for a virtual world.
Personally, I’m hoping more meetings take place virtually in the very, very near future, as it costs a huge amount to commute around the UK, and a lot of times it’s really been a waste of resources. But, as you say, it’s still a struggle for companies to understand SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Wikis etc, let alone all gathering on a virtual island for an important meeting.
Simon 08.15.08 at 12:30 pm
Four years is a long time to see such adaption happening. Lets keep in mind that the web technologies are slowly transitioning into an even more richer and semantic based environment. The web 2.0 that we know today, will soon have evolved into something much greater and bigger. In my POV, the way social interactions are evolving, virtual worlds will become much more accesable with much lesser learning curves that they have today. It’ll be as simple to socialize, meet, network, launch events etc in virtual worlds as it is to check your emails.
Companies with offices spread out nationally or internationally may quite as well create online worlds for their internal training camps, meetups etc. We see it happening in SecondLife today, and we’ll continue to see it happening on a larger scale with different dynamics in the future.